By this, you mean what?

Excel and Word have different default properties - unfortunately in this case, this is where they are designed to work differently!

In Word, you need to select 2 adjoining cells and merge them if you wish text to be shown in them as if they were one cell - In Excel, the original grid cell borders are not defined until something is entered into them - hence the ability to overlap! This only happens if no data is entered into adjoining cells, thus defining the new cell edge property.

That's it I'm afraid - no magic 'alter Word to Excel' button. Even creating in Excel and copying to Word won't work, because Word DOES define cell borders upon creation of a table - even when it's imported.

Sorry that I can't help you on this, but that's just the way it is!