Word 2003 and Corrupt Tables

[A DeLew]

I am a long-time user of Word and edit technical training documents that
uses table cells for text and lots of different iterations of table formats.
Our corporation just loaded Word 2003 and now, suddenly, I'm having a huge
problem with corrupt tables. The documents being sent to me are not
corrupt, but something is happening that results in Word assessing some,
many or all of the tables as corrupt. If I do an "Open and Repair" Words
repair makes a huge mess of the entire document. Any ideas where I start?
Is it possible I need to get Technical Support to do a "repair" of my Word
app?

 

[Jezebel]

You could try reinstalling Word (that's all there is to 'repairing' it); but
the problem is more likely the change in the way tables are handled between
W2000 and W2003 -- this was a fairly major change, trying to deal with the
difference between tables as handled in a document and tables as rendered on
web pages.

W2003 is unhappy with very long tables (ie spanning a lot of pages) and
tables with complicated merged and split cells.

Long-term, the fix is to stop using tables for page layout purposes (as has
been the change with HTML over the past few years): use them only for
tabulated data as such. If the problem is multi-page tables, split them into
shorter sections. Also make sure you don't have style challenges like
several pages of consective 'Keep with next' paragraphs within the tables.

Or why not just go back to using W2000?

I have no idea what 'iteration of table formats' means.

 

[A DeLew]

This was just an upgrade from Word 2002 to 2003, not from 2000. We have very
distinct style rules about managing the tables we do use, knowing that long
tables, embedded tables, and tables in general can be a "pain". The writers
in the group are using the same 2003 version of Word to create the
documents that contain the tables, and they are not having the issue with
corrupt tables. It is only after the file is sent to me and I work with it
in the editing process that the corrupt table occurs.

 

[Jezebel]

In some set-ups, there is an issue with Word documents being damaged by the
process of emailing. Pick one of the documents that's caused you a problem
and ask the sender to resend it as a zip file. (That's the most common
work-araound, anyway.)

 

[A DeLew]

The documents are zipped when emailing. Some are not emailed but are
transferred by being posted to and downloaded from a shared drive. Our tech
support person just dropped by and said my copy of the template I use for
these documents must be corrupt. I have the same template on my laptop also
with Word 2003 and I do not have these issues. I have deleted my template
and reloaded one from another user of the template. I am still having the
problem. Is there something in my registry perhaps that could be causing
the problem? And, as I say this, should this problem be better directed to
a newsgroup for errors and Word operational issues rather than where I've
posted it?

 

[group]

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