Yes I've seen this before -- along with a whole host of other bizarre
glitches related to tables, particularl,y in great honking "table docs"
(docs that are essentially one big table or a large collection of
humongous tables). Word is notorious for table troubles -- they're
great as long as you put 'em in and leave 'em alone. Once you start
messing about with either their contents or the paras immediately
surrounding them, things can get hinky.
The cleanest system I've used to handle large table docs (again, as you
note, gov't, often compliance docs, that are nothing but one huge table
after another for 50+ pages) is to flat out avoid dealing with tables
at all until just before I'm ready to print. Sounds weird, I know,
but..... follow along.
I build the doc as a straight Word doc and format the sections that are
to become tables as tab-delim paras (set up for eventually conversion
to tables). For review purposes (sending out to people to review in the
format they expect to see it in), I convert all those sections to
tables and format 'em as needed. Do a Save As and save it as Rev 1 XXX
-table.doc. Send out that doc for review and let everyone muck with it
and comment it to kingdom come. When all the changes come back, I go
back to the tab-delim doc, put in all the text and moving changes and
save it -- still in tab-delim. Then I convert to tables, retweak, and
do another Save As Rev 2 XXX -table.doc from the modified tab-delim
file (again with the pretty tables showing) and send that out for
review/signoff. When they're all done mucking about, I repeat the
process, starting again from the non-table doc. Table-ize it, tweak the
formatting, and Save As to the "final doc". (And repeat that benighted
*$%!#@ final doc stage as many times as necessary, always starting from
my own, non-table-ized doc.)
Some other tips for minimizing messes with big table-docs (docs that
are essentially one or two monster tables):
1) Break those tables up!!!!!! Make 'em smaller. Either arbitrarily,
by page, or figure out what makes sense in terms of content, but make
'em less than three pgs each and give 'em a para in between
occasionally (even if that para is formatted to be 2pt type) as
breathing room.
2) When copy and pasting content, be very careful to only select the
_contents_ of a cell to replace. Do not even dream of doing multiple
replaces of whole rows/columns of data. This really upsets Word. You
can usually get away with it once or twice (saving after each move!!)
but after that, you are asking for big time trouble.
3) If you absolutely MUST replace multiple rows/columns of info in a
big selection, replace one batch, save it, close the app. Reopen the
doc and do the next batch, save it and close the app. Do not under any
circumstances let Word try to play "fast save" games with such table
replacements. You risk ferociously corrupting your document.
OK to your problem specifically.
With issues like the above, if such signs of severe unhappiness begin
to show up I do the following.
1. Go back to the original doc, prior to the revisioning that caused
the misbehavior (you did save a clean copy before reformatting?)
2. Select the section of the table to be revised. Break it out from the
larger table by creating a new table. (Frankly I often do this in
another doc.)
3. Convert the table to tab-delim text
4. Make all changes (text, moving pix, etc.) in tab-delim mode
5. Reinsert the section into the appropriate place in the doc
-->2 ways for this either do it all in the other doc, then convert
to table and insert that table into the original doc -- you can try it
as an addition to the existing table (try alternate if things break),
or insert it into a break you create as a new table OR simply copy and
paste the CONTENTS of the cells one at a time into the old table
6. Tweak any formatting needed.
7. Save the changed doc (new rev number) and send out for review.
Repeat as necessary.
Ugly, but my experience with gov't compliance docs with massive tables
has always been problematic.
