Thanks for your response Charles! I think it is less to do with the template being in SharePoint and more how SharePoint interacts with Word doc, particularly when co-authoring. My sense is that something has changed in the past few weeks which is how messing up tables even more than they usually would be and I'm trying to see if anyone else is having this issue. Part of the running saga I have on another forum site which people occasionally add their voice to:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/...earing/2176730

I don't think Workgroup templates will work for me as not everyone working on these is a company employee: we work with a lot of JV partners who are remote or even if working in our office they won't have proper access to our network. In any case the only reason I need the template available is due to the way that the documents are constantly getting messed up. Co-authoring is so problematic however I don't think we could go back to any other way of working unfortunately. I just had hoped that the world's largest software company might have fixed these issues after a decade!