I have a dog with an autoimmune disease, and we are having trouble diagnosing an issue he has related to his stomach. So, I created a log to try and track his symptoms in relation to food and exercise to try and find a pattern in the symptoms. I made the log by making several tables and joining them together. First of all, I'm not sure that was the easiest way to do it, but I didn't know how else to make a table with rows that have different quantities of columns. I joined the tables by putting them as close together as I could, and then turned off text wrapping on the bottom table. They go right up to each other, but they don't seem to be truly joined because when I space them down the page, it splits itself onto the next page. If they were truly joined, wouldn't the entire table space itself down in one piece?

Second issue is that I want to be able to enter the details in the log on my phone. I have a couple word document applications on my phone, and the table isn't right in either one. I don't know if the problem is the way I joined the table, or if it is just a limitation of my device. It might just be the software, but since it's like this in two different apps, I can't say for sure. What is my best bet to try and fix this issue?

Edit to add: I forgot to mention that I am using MS Word on a mac if it makes a difference.


Here is the table, as you can see it looks normal



Here it is spaced down the page, so you can see how it breaks.





And finally, here is how it looks on my phone. It's all messed up here.

Hi Alphabravo,

What you're descibing with the table breaking across page boundaries is normal behaviour. If you want to prevent that, you need to format the paragrahs for all cells except the last in at least one column with the 'keep with next' attribute.

I can't help you with the phone display, though, but it looks as if the phone app doesn't support some Word table properties. However, you should be able to overcome that by making all rows the same width, through the addition of empty cells on the right & left sides of the short rows, as appropriate.

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

Great, thanks for letting me know that is normal. I couldn't figure out if I was doing something wrong and it was really bothering me! Thanks for the tip about formatting paragraphs, that should help me out with that issue.

Regarding the mobile device display, I found one more application after trying several, that displays the table properly. I will just go ahead and go with this one and I think I'll be fine!

Thanks again!