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Diane Evans wondered: <<An intern last summer made a bunch of Word
files from a database. The files contain a bunch of tables. When the
document is viewed in "Normal View," the tables look fine. When the
document is viewed in "Print Layout View," the tables are layered on
top of each other (which is how the document prints). When the
document is viewed in "Web Layout View," the tables are side by side in
two columns.>>
How were the tables created? If they are embedded objects, this might
explain what you're seeing. If that's the case, and you don't need to
constantly update the contents, you should consider converting them to
Word tables; embedded objects bloat files and can cause problems when
you move the file between computers. I believe there's a right-click
menu shortcut for this conversion.
Are the tablea actually uneditable graphics rather than tables, or
tables inserted in text boxes? Graphics versions of tables are a
surprisingly prevalent form in my experience, and you'll need to select
each table, and modify its graphics properties such as positioning;
better still, find the original data and convert it into a Word table
by exporting it as tab-delimited text. If the tables are inserted as
text boxes, copy them, delete the text boxes, and paste them into the
main text. Text boxes are evil. <g> (I'm not betting this is the case,
since you shouldn't generally see text boxes in Normal view, at least
not in older versions of Word.)
If the tables were created as Word tables, they or the document
containing them may have become corrupted in some way. To solve this,
try the easy way first: position the cursor within the first table,
select the whole table (Control-Alt-T, I believe, but
Table-->Select-->Entire table if not), copy it, then paste it into a
new document. Repeat as necessary. If that doesn't solve the problem,
the document as a whole may be corrupted, so try a "save as" in text
format, then reimport the text into a Word document and recreate the
tables.
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