Betalogue

Word’s table tools include a feature called “Heading Rows Repeat” (in the “Table” menu) which is actually a formatting option. When you apply this option to your table’s first row, this indicates to Word that the first row is actually a “heading row”, i.e. a row that contains column headings. And if your table ends up being longer than one page, Word will automatically repeat the heading row at the beginning of each new page spanned by the table.

Cool.

You would think, however, that, once you’ve applied the “Heading Rows Repeat” option to your table’s first row, Word would be smart enough to figure out that it should not insert an automatic page break between that first row and the second table row.

Think again. If your table happens to begin near the end of a page in Word’s automatic pagination, and if there is only enough room at the bottom of the page for one table row, Word will still gleefully leave the heading row by itself at the bottom of the page — and repeat it immediately at the beginning of the next page, of course.

In order to prevent this from happening, you actually have to not only apply to the first row of your table the “Heading Rows Repeat” formatting option, but also the “Keep with next” option — which is not to be found anywhere in the “Table” menu, since it’s a paragraph-level formatting option that resides inside the “Paragraph” dialog box accessed through the “Format” menu.

It’s good to know — especially if you want to have any semblance of control over what your document will look like on the printed page.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, January 31st, 2005 at 6:06 am and is filed under Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.