Sure, glad I could help, Lourens.
If you don’t mind, I’ll merge this into a general request about the ability to not drop the appearance of a shape when it gets converted to an area type.

Hi. Thanks for the reply.

Your direction did help and I was able to accomplish what I needed.
It's a better way than I am used to, though it's still a learning curve, but better than going through the nightmarish attributes panel.

It would be great to have it streamlined across both applications.

Thanks again.

Type > Area Type Options dialog would allow you to specify Inset Spacing to get the padding you need.

Selecting the shape only, not the whole object (with Direct or Group Selection tools) would allow you to set the fill color directly for the shape. InDesign has a dedicated toggle in the Control panel to switch between the frame and the text, but Ai doesn’t: while type in InDesign is always an Area Type and HAS to have a frame, Illustrator also offers Point Type, and this is probably a reason why Illustrator never had this dedicated toggle in the Control / Properties panel to switch between the text in an area type and its frame, similar to InDesign...

It’s a somewhat similar deal with the order of operations we have to do while creating something like this — in Ai we have to style the frame after creating an area type, not before: Illustrator drops the original appearance, using the path only; it does a similar things for clipping paths, blends, etc. — only the geometry is sourced. This is something many users want, perhaps it would change someday. I personally believe user data is sacred, and dropping it should be optional.

Does it help in any way? Ai and InD are very similar, but were built to solve different tasks. Their similarity serves us both good and bad, making the small things that make them unique and well suited for their general purposes to haunt on in the long run when switching.

Please comment back.

Hi there. thanks for replying.

I referred to a shape with text inside, not a text frame. I know how to get a text frame in Illustrator - click and drag.
I understand where the confusion came in, by mentioning "text box."

See the screenshot with descriptions. This should give a clear picture.

I don’t get it, sorry. Why use Appearance at all? You just grab the Type tool and click into a path, and it works... Please elaborate. Am I missing something?

After all these years, have you still not included an easier way to type text in a box!?!?
Darn it! It's so easy in InDesign, why can't you just do that in Illustrator too?
I just want to type in a rectangular box and reshape the text box, with the text inside, without having to take the back route of "appearance." It's so complicated, I keep on forgetting how to use it. !!!!!±!!!!!!!@!@!!!!!!@!

We have to take the darn back route of going into appearance and so on. It's pathetic.