Hi! New to the forums, but I've got a few questions I'm hoping to clear up. For starters, my most recent problem:

I had this table, 7 by 18, and I realized that the last two rows need to be 3 by 36 -two rows for every one of the first three columns. Should have been easy as pie to split them. But when I tried to do it I received and error: "The number [of rows] must be between 1 and 18". I tried splitting 2 rows into 4 and I received the same message: "The number must be between 1 and 2". Only one row could I split into two. What the hell?

Note: Normally I could've worked around this easily, but I had already filled the first 4 by 18 cells with data. When I created a 7 by 36 table and then split the first 4 by 36 into 4 by 18, pasting the info didn't work (Word pasted two rows of data per cell).

Long story short I had to duplicate my work. It was infuriating. Any ideas why this happened?

If you need to split the 3 cells in a given row into multiple rows, select those cells and choose 1 for the number of columns & 2 for the number of rows. If you need to do that for two or more rows, process them one at a time - you can't do them together.

Splitting cells into multiple columns is quite simple and can be done for both rows in one pass. You can either select all the cells and accept the split defaults (6 columns & 2 rows) which assumes cell merging before splitting, or uncheck that option and accept the new split defaults (2 columns & 1 row).

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

I guess this is hard to explain with just words and I'm not quite sure I understand what you're saying. Let me show you a screenshot. Below the entire three columns to the right were selected in full (they got unselected when I took the screenshot). I tried to split them from 8 rows into 16 and there's the error. Is there truly no way around this? It seems incredible I can only split one row at a time!

That is only so for splitting cells into multiple rows. It's still not obvious from your screenshot what you're trying to do. Perhaps you could attach a document to a post, containing before & after versions of your table.

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

This is what I have (for example):



This is what I want:

For that, you can choose to create as many rows as you need for either:
• columns 2 & 3, then merge rows in column 1 (you could do this by row pairs, or by merging all into one cell, then splitting that cell into 3 rows); or
• column 1, then split the rows for columns 2 & 3, one row at a time.

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

That's where the issue lies. Method 1 was not practical because column 1 was full of data and there were many rows of it.

As far as method two, here's what happens:

First I select the rows and columns to split:



Then I open the split cells dialog and choose the number of columns (same) and rows (2x) I want:



And the result (where "the number" means the number of rows):

You would need to split the rows individually, not collectively.

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

Thanks. It's mind-boggling that a software that can be so powerful at some things cannot do some awfully basic stuff, like this or like setting default options for text boxes and tables.

It's hardly mind-boggling that the software doesn't come with facilities to compensate for a user's poor table design. Be thankful the fix is a trivial undertaking.

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

I am only thankful for your help and attention, but only that. A "fix" that means going through 17 rows one by one is hardly trivial. Trivial would be to split two rows in four, which Word cannot do. This is not an advanced function we're talking about. Open-source software like LibreOffice has no issues with the little "glitches" Word suffers from. Word wins the beauty contests and the monopoly contests that forces users like me to use it, but Libre is the much superior software.

Until you try to use it for anything serious. There is a reason people pay for Word instead of using Libre and the like that they can get for free...

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