Merging two tables where there is a page break.

[Gail]

How do I delete the space between two tables so that Word sees them as one
table?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Ordinarily, you select the paragraph mark (or whatever) and press Delete.
Sometimes this deletes the space but doesn't join the tables. This can
happen when one or more of the tables is wrapped, when rows in the second
table have been marked as heading rows, and possibly when nesting is
involved.

 

[Gail]

Hi Suzanne
Thanks for the input. As it turns out, after I posted the question I trolled
around in this site and found a number of posts and replies on the same
question. I was able to delete the paragraph mark by it didn't join the
tables - no matter what I tried, and after I made sure there was no word
wrapping and removed the heading rows (no nesting involved). So I ended up
adding rows to the first table and just cutting/pasting the contents from the
second table into them. It was a pain to reformat row sizes, but not as much
of a pain as racking my head on the challenge.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I've had this happen, too, in a document I created myself, with tables I
created myself--could not find anything wrong with them but could not get
them to join. In your case, I missed the fact that you had a page break. Did
you check the first row of the second table to see if it was formatted "Page
break before"? This won't actually split the table (the rows on the second
page will be part of the same table), but it will cause that part of the
table to be on a new page.

 

[Gail]

Suzanne - I think I figured out the problem. Users of Word 2002 can delete
the paragraph mark and append one table to another with a simple press of the
"Delete" key. (I found someone to test this with the same document).
So somehow Word 2003 took that capability away - at least the user-friendly
capability. Perhaps someone more savy than I with Word can figure out a
work-around, but it is not built into the program's functionality as far as I
can figure.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I ordinarily have no trouble doing exactly this in Word 2003. I routinely
split long tables to improve performance, then rejoin them before I save the
document. The only times I've had problems I've concluded there must be some
corruption in the table. This can be a problem if there are merged cells.