align table borders with text wrap on

[Ulophot]

Corporate reports often have something called a "callout" table, a small
table, perhaps 2.5 inches wide, accompanying a section headline, with some
pertinent text. With the table's text wrap-around on, and horizontal
alignment to margin or column, Word aligns the table's CONTENT, not the cell
borders, to the margin. Therefore, if the borders show or cells are filled
with tone, they clearly lie just outside the margin, looking sloppy.
The only way I can discover to solve this, is to set the cell padding to
zero. Even this doesn't actually work, as made clear by increasing the border
width to an appreciable weight, e.g., 3 pts.

Is there no way to align the outside of the cell border?

 

[Stefan Blom]

Choose Table | Table Properties. After you've set the cell margin to
zero, do the following: Click the Table tab. Click the Positioning
button. At "Horizontal position," type the width of the border (in
this case: 3 pt), set "Relative to" to "Column," and click OK twice.

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP


in message
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[Ken]

This works for tables only if they are left-aligned. For right-aligned
tables, you have to manually calculate the text area width (page width minus
margins) and subtract the table width from that to determine how far from the
left margin you need to be. In that case I hope you specified the column
width so you know exactly how wide your table is.

The only tables which seem to let you align vertical borders with margins
are centered inline tables which span the whole text area (which kind of
defeat the purpose here).

It's even worse for vertical alignment with the margins. Positioning a
table "bottom" relative to the margin works if you don't justify text
vertically. If you do, it's hit or miss as to whether or tables will align
relative to the margin or relative to some other unknown position. So you
have to use absolute positioning, again manually subtracting the table height
from the text area. The horizontal borders seem to align (whereas vertical
borders require including cell margins and border thickness). However, since
there is no way to define a table height I've found that I need to draw a
line the height of the table and get the line's length to measure the table
height. (don't even get me started on Word not aligning text to the margins
even when vertically justified which makes it impossible to have text and
tables aligned at the bottom of a page).

So the workaround above is very limited and the broader question remains,
how to get Word to align tables to borders (so that you don't have to
statically set the margins, table sizes, and positions in order to align the
table)? This should be very easy to do. I can't imagine any reason to align
the table based on anything other than the border.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

It would be considerably more trouble, but you might experiment with the
results of reducing cell padding to 0" (which would put your borders at the
outside edges of the table rather than outside them) and then creating cell
padding by adding paragraph indents and Space Before/After.