Microsoft Office Forums - View Single Post - Cursor Jumps Above Table When Entering Text Into Cell

Guessed · 07-01-2020, 08:41 PM

I've had a look at the document and could reproduce the issue you are having so I know what is going on now.

The problem you are seeing is not with your template at all but a 'new feature' that Microsoft added at some stage. In older versions of Word, if your document started with table, it was a common annoyance that it wasn't simple to add content in front of that table. MS developers eventually listened to 30+ years of customer complaints and added a special feature that if your cursor was in the first position in the document AND was in a table cell then pressing Enter adds a paragraph above the table. As far as I know, this isn't controllable via an option but you can live with it if you adjust your behaviour.

Firstly, good practice would dictate that you don't add empty paragraphs to push following content down the page so starting a table cell with an empty paragraph is not good practice. If you always intend to vertically centre the content you are adding to that cell then you should apply that alignment to the first cell (as you did in the cell below it). If you are adding the paragraph to push the first text away from the top, do it by either using a style with paragraph 'space before' or by adjusting the table cell top margin.

If you want to ignore good practice, you could add a space before pressing Enter. If you forget and press Enter in the first cell and this problem happens, put your cursor back into the first cell and press Enter a second time, then go back to the unwanted paragraph above the table and delete it.