Word 2004: Unpredictable behaviour when copying and pasting table rows

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Microsoft
December 5th, 2005 • 3:26 pm

This is exactly the type of flakiness that is so infuriating in Microsoft Word 2004.

Take a very simple table, like the one below:

Simple table

After selecting the first row, as illustrated in the picture, I press command-C to copy it to the Clipboard. Then I move the insertion point to the location immediately after the last table row and I hit command-V. As expected, Word appends the copied table row to the existing table:

Simple table

No problems here. This is as expected. It’s what I wanted.

But now take this table, which I have in another Word document:

Other table row

Same idea. I’ve selected a row in the table and I want to append a copy of that row to the table. So I select it as indicated in the picture, and I hit command-C to copy it to the Clipboard. Then I move the insertion point to the location immediately after the last table row and I hit command-V.

Here again, as expected, Word appends the copied table row to the existing table. But look at what happens:

Other table row

The text in the pasted table row is now in bold! Why on earth does it do this?

It can’t be because the text in the last row in the table is in bold, because I had the exact same situation in the other table above, and the problem did not occur. (Word does have this feature where the text formatting used for a newly inserted table row is carried over from the row before the inserted row, but this is only supposed to affect newly inserted rows, not existing rows that are copied and pasted.)

It is not because I have used manual formatting in one table and style-based formatting in the other one. I tried with both. The problem is the same.

So what’s going on here? I have no idea. And I suggest that Microsoft has no idea either. As far as one can tell, they simply don’t care. Their product is incredibly flaky, but it still sells millions, so what’s the point of fixing it? I ask you.


Comments are closed.

Leave a Reply

Comments are closed.