Hello Diane,
You don't say which version you are in; some are worse than others.
I think what you have been doing has gradually been too much for Word to
handle (it's not your fault though -- it's the software!).
You'll see in the following notes that merging and splitting table cells are
high on the following list for causing problems:
John McGhie, one of our experts, says that the things to avoid with tables
because they lead to instability include the following:
* tables within tables;
* merging or splitting table cells;
* dragging text between cells (you will still end up with a corrupt
document if you do too much of this; it's OK if you are sure that you only
have text selected, but if you make a mistake and select a cell, there's
trouble ahead);
* dragging individual cells (but it's OK to drag rows or columns around);
* cutting and pasting in tables (it will do it, but table corruption is
likely to result ? but cutting and pasting or dragging and dropping whole
rows is usually OK);
Further, the more of the following you use, and the more often in a
document, the less stable things become: text wrapping, automatically resize
to fit contents, allow rows to break across pages, and nested tables.
[All but the last are configurable via Table menu -> Properties (after
selecting the table). Once you have turned them off, Word will be quite
snappy ? because it will no longer, for example, have to scroll the table to
the power of the number of cells in it.]
If a document has tables extending over more than a few pages and is slow,
select each table in turn and for each table go to Table menu -> Insert ->
Table and de-select "Auto fit to contents" (this is also a power-hungry
feature).
To remove corruption in tables (revealed by slowness of actions, caused by
the need to use huge amounts of memory), select each table and use Table ->
Convert -> Table to Text to turn the table into tabbed text, then without
moving the selection use Table -> Convert -> Text to Table to convert it
back to a table again. If that does not work, the document may be corrupt.
To fix it, go to the end of the document, key Command-8 to show all
paragraph marks (if you normally have them invisible) and select all the
document except the last paragraph mark. Then copy and paste the selected
text into a new document (if it is attached to a special template you will
need to re-attach the new document). This action usually solves the problem
because the final paragraph mark contains the document1s formatting
information that is most likely to be corrupted. Pasting everything except
the last paragraph mark into a new document forces Word to repair the
internal structure of the document.
If you have a type of format that's consistent but the content differs (e.g.
one type of table has, say, the top row right across the page, then the
next row three cells across, and the next whatever) it would be better to
make an AutoText item of each of these formats in turn. You would prepare
blank examples of these tables and remove potential corruption as in the
para above. In the new document in which you paste these tables, you would
select the tables and make each into AutoText items as I described in a
slightly different context (subject: "Re: how to assign a toolbar in Word to
"Insert Pictures From File"") in this newsgroup earlier today. Then all you
would have to do is two lots of keystrokes to have this corruption-free type
of table inserted in your document. It's so long since I inserted tables
and modified them by hand that I can't remember (and they never corrupt).
-- Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
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Hi!
I've been creating a form in Word using a table. Everything was going
well, no troubles with splitting cells and merging cells and resizing
cells and then all of a sudden I could no longer make those kinds of
changes.
It's as if the table is locked or something but I don't know what I
did wrong and I can't figure out how to fix it. It won't let me
merge, or split or change the width of the cells... ?
Can anyone please help me?
Thank you very much!
Diane Dennis