Hi:



New member here. I am programmer that works primarily in Visual Studio but I also do MS office automation using VBA.

I am having problems with MS Word tables. I have created a VBA macro to search for a particular table based on the table title. The macro works great, however, I think my problem is more with MS Word in general vs my automation. So my Word document has different tables side by side on a page. The left table had the alignment set to left and the text wrapping set to none. The right hand table had the alignment set to Right and the text wrapping set to Around. Each table was given a different title in the properties window. Let say I named the LH table Table1 and the RH table Table2. After changing the title in the properties, I would save my document and verify both tables had the correct name. If, however, I would close the document and reopen it, the table name on one of the tables would change to match the other. At first I thought I missed something so I changed the names again but each time the name would change after opening the document.

As a test, I changed the format of both tables to be LH alignment and No Text Wrapping. After doing this, I no longer have the issue. This seems like a bug to me. I would like to go back to side by side tables to save space so I'm wondering if there is some type of work around? Has anyone else experienced this before?

By the way, I'm using MS Word 2016.

Thanks,

Sounds like a bug but it is obscure enough that it may never be corrected. I presume that the floating table's anchor is located in the left side non-floating table so Word gets confused by this. On normal floating graphics you can set an option to see where the anchor is and drag it to another location. Tables don't display this anchor so you need to guess where it might be.

In my experience it doesn't sound like a page layout that I would recommend. Floating tables is not good at the best of times but placing it beside another table is asking for problems.

Can the same visual layout exist by doing this as a single table with a non bordered column between the 'tables'?
Another possibility is to throw in two continuous section breaks and put both tables inline in a two column section.
Another possibility is to live with the same table title and find the one that is floating.

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

I don't have Word 2016, but I have a template that uses one large table, one row by 3 columns, each column holding a subordinate table, and they each have different formatting. The first sub-table even has another small table inside of it. At least one of the users also has a mail-merge setup to populate this set of tables, and I've never had an issue with formatting changing. I I should say that none of these tables has a proper caption title. They do have header rows in two cases.

So maybe a larger two-cell table holding your two tables (with invisible borders) would help?

I've had some issues with users deleting the page breaks and paragraph breaks between these tables (they are designated to fit two to one 11 x 17" landscape page), and when that happens, two tables with nothing in between them join together and have to be split.

The OP is referring to setting the title in the Alt Text tab of the table properties. This title can then be used in code to identify the table.

Yes, I was just mentioning my setup didn't use those titles so I wasn't quite sure how they would be affected. But I have had no other issues with tables of differing formats nested within larger tables.

Nesting tables does complicate things. It is a great feature but should not be used when not needed.