Word's captioning isn't designed to work the way you seem to want it to. The nearest you can get to doing that reliably would be to forego the use of Word's captions and assign heading Styles for use with the Tables and Equations (e.g. Table = Heading 8, Equation - Heading 9), with numbering the one used for the table unlinked from the other heading Styles and only set to include the multi-level list numbering for its own level and the multi-level list numbering for the Equations to re-set on each change in the Table numbering. You can prefix the numbering for each as Tbl and Eqn, respectively, so they should still look much the same as captions, but with the numbering setup you're after.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]