For drawing in an MS Word for Mac 2016 document, a canvas is apparently no longer necessary. Is it nevertheless available in any way? I liked them; they helped keep things contained.
UPDATE: I am running on OS X. Have been informed that it is rather different from Word on Windows machines.
Best Answer
On Windows Word 2016, the option is called
New Canvas Drawing
and is at the bottom of Insert tab->Illustrations group->Shapes dropdown.There is no such option on Mac Word 2016 (or 2011 for that matter). Word VBA on Mac does not currently have the AddCanvas command that the Windows version has, either, so it does not look as if you can create a macro to add one. (If you try to use the command to insert a shape of type msoCanvas, you get something that looks like a No Entry road sign, and it does not work like a canvas).
Because the canvas feature is not provided on Mac, it is difficult to recommend using them, as they may not actually be supported.
However, if you create a document on Windows Word and insert a canvas, then open that in Mac Word 2016 (or 2011), you get a Canvas that appears to work in a similar way on Mac. So if you have such a document, you could
Then use the autotext feature to insert the canvas.
If you do not have such a document, you can use the XML I have provided below. To do that,
You should then be able to open canvas.xml in Word. The canvas probably won't be visible until you click on it (it's at the top left of the document in the main text area).
Then save the canvas as an autotext, as suggested earlier.