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When writing technical documents, it is often required for tables to not wrap across columns and page breaks, so that all data from a given table are displayed in one place. In LaTeX, there is a setting to prevent tables from wrapping unless they are simply too long to do otherwise. Is there any similar such setting for Word 2010?

I know I can manually insert column and page breaks, but it becomes a hassle to reformat the entire document if I add in two lines of text which bumps two lines of a table over to the next column. I also found an option under Table Properties for "don't break row over pages", but this doesn't seem to do what I want. Is there any other setting that can do this?



unhappy column


happy column

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+1 for amusing illustrations. –  Fake Name Jan 24 '11 at 1:57
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1 Answer

up vote 13 down vote accepted

Based on this guide from the MS Word MVP FAQ site. Quotes are from the article; screenshots were taken for this post.

In Word 2007, on the Home tab, locate the Paragraph group. Click the dialog launcher (small arrow) in the bottom right corner to open the Paragraph dialog. Select the Line and Page Breaks tab.

Select the expand arrow in the corner of the paragraph section

  • “Keep lines together,” as the name implies, keeps all the lines of a paragraph together. That is, it keeps a single paragraph from being split across two pages.

  • “Keep with next” keeps a given paragraph with the following one. That is, it prevents the two paragraphs from being separated across two pages (the individual paragraphs, however, can be split internally unless “Keep lines together” is also applied). This property is assigned by default to Word's built-in Heading 1–Heading 4 styles to ensure that headings stay with following text.

Select both of these properties to force the table to wrap columns or go to the next page if it exceeds the available space.

format paragraph

Now the table behaves as desired:

table fixed

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A note to the answer The "Keep with next" option stops working when "Text wrapping" is set to "Around". There seems to be no workaround. So if OP wants to put an automatic distance after the tables, the answer does not solve the problem. However, that does not seem to be the case from the pictures. –  wordman Apr 22 at 13:00
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