Keeping caption with text-wrapped tables

[Blake]

I have a few tables in a document that I would like to
wrap text around. The problem is that the table's
caption, when text is wrapped, appears in places other
than where it should be, like in the middle of the
paragraph wrapped around the table. I could place the
table and the caption in a frame (I think), but I would
like to avoid doing so to prevent maintenance problems
(it is a long document). I could add another row above
the table, without any borders, and place the caption in
that, ensuring that the caption stays in the same place
relative to the table, but that seems to come with its
own set of problems. Is there a better solution that I
have not thought of? Is there something I am missing?
Does Word have no feature like, for instance, Framemaker,
that attaches captions to tables?

Thanks for any help

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

A frame is the best solution. When you "wrap" a table, you're effectively
putting it in a frame, anyway. It isn't really in the drawing layer in the
same way that drawing objects and wrapped graphics are; if you open a Word
2000 or above document with wrapped tables in Word 97, the wrapped tables
are framed. Moreover, you can see the "wrapped" table in Normal view (you
can't see drawing objects, text boxes, or wrapped graphics, all of which are
actually in the drawing layer).

If you don't want to use an actual frame, then putting the caption in the
top row of the table is the next-best approach. This prevents you from
having repeating heading rows (unless you include the caption), but you
can't break wrapped tables across pages in Word 2000, anyway (you can in
Word 2002, but it's probably not advisable since it's not
backward-compatible).

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word
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