You could either:


a) insert a page break before the table (e.g. via Ctrl-Enter); or
b) format the first paragraph in the table with the 'page break before' attribute.

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

Hi macropod. Thanks for your reply.
When I insert a page break I get the complete table at the top of the next page, which is what I want.
But what I also want is to avoid or remove the blank space at the bottom of the first page where the beginning of the table used to be.
My question is how do I do that without adding text for the sake of it, which I referred to as waffle text, or moving text from the next page to the bottom of the first page. How, in other words, do I fill the space at the bottom of the first page using pre-existing text rather than creating it for that purpose?
Why, you might ask, do I not move text from the second page to the bottom of the first page? Because that text was written after the table and refers to it, so it would look odd if it was moved to before the table.
Quite simply, forgetting all about tables, what I am asking is whether there is some way, when there is a space at the bottom of a page, to stretch the contents of that page, or even several previous pages, to fill that space.Thanks again.

To do that, you could adjust the paragraph line spacing on the page - but even that might look strange.

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

Hi macropod. Thanks to you and the other contributors I have a much better idea now of the various options, my preferred one being to edit the page in order to make room for the complete table. This would be easier, however, if there was a way to tweak the table size, keeping in mind the requirement of legibility, so that I could make it smaller I notice that the cells are bigger then the entries require them to be, but this is the first time for me to use tables, so I'm stuck. Thanks again.

That's a quite different proposition to how you described the problem when the thread started, viz: «how do I remove space left at bottom of page when table moved to next page». Reducing a table's size to fit the current page is entirely different from filling up the space left behind when you move the table to the next page.

There are numerous ways to reduce a table's height, including reducing the:
1. row heights;
2. cell top/bottom margins;
3. font sizes; and
4. paragraph line-spacing and/or before/after spacing.
The first two options are available via Table Tools|Layout. The second two option are the same as for manipulating paragraph formats anywhere else in the document and can be applied to any part of the whole page, or even to the whole document, not just to paragraphs within the table.

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

Hi macropod. Thanks very much for the information and for all your help. Thanks again.