It is going to drive me mad this prog.



Recreating a photocopied document I find I need a list of chapters with a solid line beneath each entry.

I look up how to do it and find three '-' in a row and press enter does it.

Wonderful. So I do that.

Then I need to space out the entries a bit so I do a carriage return to create a blank space, blank line - and the thing draws another line across the page!

And every time I do a carriage return it makes another!

And I can delete them but it deletes the blank line, too, so the text closes up again!

What madness! How to deal with this? How to create lines across the page wherever you want - i.e. in this case between lines of text - without all this superfluous automatic creation of lines you never asked for?

Thanks to the excellent 'undo' feature I've gone back to prior to all this and will proceed with other parts of the doc - the tables, maybe, until I get wised up on this feature.

phew.....

p.s. also, while I was doing it, I found that doing a carriage return at the end of the line and THEN doing the '---' trick created a new blank line as well as a solid line - so then I had to delete that blank line - upon which the solid line disappeared, too. So I had to do it at the beginning of the line... and so on... I mean... what's the 'proper' way to do it in the first place, before we get to the problem of automatic creation of unwanted?

Hi abrogard,

Instead of hitting Enter to space out the lines, go to Format|Paragraph and incease the line spacing and/or the paragraph before/after space settings.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thank you for that. I've taken to using the 'drawn' line. Bit of a hassle finding it on the menu every time but you can't expect everything to be a keystroke away can you?

Should I start another thread for this or do you have a quick answer - how to get these tables organised in the quickest way possible - this is how they came out of my OCR:


Table 21
Development of selected Anbarra children

Behaviour A Age when behaviour first noted (weeks)' Expected in
European
Male Male Female Female Female Female child
Following with eyes by 4 2 by 3 by 3 by 3 by 7 4
Lying on back lifts head up by 4 3 4 5 3 by 7 7
Lying on stomach lifts head up by 4 3 5 5 4 by 7 7
Lying on stomach pushes self up by 4 4 5 6 5 by 7 10

I currently do lots of tab,tab,tab,space,space,space and I run into times when they won't line up no matter what I do...

p.s.

and that table will be a wide rectangle, wider than the page, which I currently deal with by diminishing the font but it'd be better if I could put it on the page rotated 90 degrees so's it went up and down - can I do that?

Hi abrogard,

It's difficult to see how your table construction could be made easier, as it's not at all evident where the column separators should be. However, if you put single tabs where the column separators should be, you can then use Word's 'text to table' function to turn the data into a proper Word table. A simpler approach, though, would be to extract the tables using software like Adobe Acrobat Pro or SolidConverterPDF.

As for your PS, you can insert a next page Section break before & after the table (Page Layout > Breaks > Section Breaks > Next Page), then change the layout of the page containing the table to landscape.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thank you for your interest and help.

I'll do what you suggest. Acrobat Pro extracts tables? I'll look into that.

Thanks again.

Hi abrogard,

Using Adobe's 'save as' function to save as a Word Document does indeed preserve the table structure.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

I think I know what we're talking about: a .pdf, right? That's where Acrobat comes in?

But I didn't' start with a .pdf I started with photocopied documents. I scanned them back in and used OCR to convert to text.

That's how come I've got these 'scrambled' tables.

Hi abrogard,

Yes, I was thinking in terms of a PDF (which is what some scanners output).

The better OCR packages also preserve table layouts. Some simply pad the data out with sufficient spaces to line up, others are more sophisticated.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]