Word Table Formatting Hell

November 30, 2015 4:39 AM

Some, but not all, tables in a long Word document I am working on keep reverting to various utterly strange formats, with missing text, mis-sized cells, and new cells within cells.

I am finding it impossible to debug this problem. As I save the tables in the correct format, they look OK. When I reopen the document, they have gone bad again. The problem seems to have arisen by editing the document on a wide variety of different Macs and PCs, not all of which have the intended font installed. I am mainly working on the document in Word for Mac 2011. Any hints for how to fix this?

posted by roofus to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

How long is the document? Past a certain length, Word gets upset.

There may be weird hidden formatting code in there from all the different versions, and that can be difficult to fix. It might be easier in the long run to delete and re-do those pages fresh without all of the historical formatting gunk.
posted by heatherann at 5:53 AM on November 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

Sometimes the only way out of Word hell is to copy and paste-as-text into fresh document and rebuild the formatting from the ground up. Use styles instead of ad-hoc formatting, if you aren't already.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 5:57 AM on November 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

I agree with the above comments. I suspect that you've inherited multiple "normal.dot" versions in the various edits (the basis on which Word interprets formatting) and then your current computer resets everything to its own version of normal.dot once the doc is closed and re-opened.

My guess is that if you were to open the Styles panel, you'd see umpteen gazillion different styles used, instead of the 10-20 that are typically needed. I think paper_chromatographologist has it right: copy and paste-as-text (no formatting) into a brand new doc, and rebuild. It will be far less frustrating in the long run. And yes, always use Styles rather than ad-hoc formatting.
posted by angiep at 7:13 AM on November 30, 2015

Is any of the workflow done on Word 2016 (or whatever version the MS Office subscription gives you these days) on any of the machines? We've recently found that the most recent version of Word does something very odd to tables, and have had to rebuild many legacy documents from scratch.
posted by scruss at 7:40 AM on November 30, 2015

Response by poster: Right now it's 361 pages. I have a plan:

1. Deleted all the crazy tables
2. Make all remaining edits
3. Repaste the tables from the last good version
4. Update the contents
5. Save as PDF.
6. Be more careful about meticulously applying and updating styles in future.
posted by roofus at 8:00 AM on November 30, 2015

I'd also try checking in the Table Properties with regard to text wrapping. Sometimes I find weird problems if text wrapping is set to "Around" instead of "None".
posted by Samarium at 8:20 AM on November 30, 2015

I too use Word 2011 on a MAC, and tables are always a PITA. I normally leave the tables in Excel then cut and paste them as PDFs into the Word doc.
posted by COD at 9:24 AM on November 30, 2015

For what it's worth, if your workflow permits it, using something like LaTeX in the future may pose a lot less headaches in the future with these large works that upset Word.
posted by Dalby at 9:32 AM on November 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Have your tried "convert tables to text" to clear out all the formatting crap, then changing them back to tables using "convert text to tables"?

Tables in Word absolutely suck.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:28 PM on November 30, 2015

If you only have a few small tables you can replace your tables with images of themselves. Screencapture/printscreen (and then crop the extra bits out) would probably be the easiest (also lowest quality) way to do this. Copy all text to new document, add images of tables where needed. (Assuming you don't need to modify these tables now or later).
posted by eisforcool at 12:50 PM on November 30, 2015