Word X: Keep with next / Keep lines together settings not honoured in table cells

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
April 22nd, 2003 • 1:12 am

If you use tables in Word for page layout and allow table rows to break across pages — which is pretty much required if your table cells contain large amounts of text — then Word will not take into account the Keep with next and Keep lines together settings (in Format>Paragraph…).

Instead you can only apply the “Keep with next” option to entire table rows in order to keep them with the next one. But if you apply the Keep with next or Keep lines together setting to a portion only of the content of a cell consisting of several paragraphs of text, then Word will not pay any attention to it in its automatic pagination.

Here is a concrete example:

A picture named WordX-TableKeep.gif

Even though it’s in French, you can see that Word has clumsily put the very last line of item d) in the first column (“auditoire donné.”) at the top of the following page (under the repeating table headings). Even if I apply the “Keep lines together” option to the item d) paragraph, the problem persists.

This effectively limits the benefits of table-based page layout significantly, and is a case of demanding too much from a word processor, I am afraid. In other words, if you need that level of control, then you probably need to switch to a page layout tool such as Adobe InDesign.

It’s too bad, though, because it seems to me that Word should be able to take these settings into account, even in table cells.


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