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My paragraphs in Word 2016 have a widow/orphan setting but are ignored in a table cell. Why?
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Answer accepted by question author
"Widow/orphan control" and "Keep lines together" have no effect in a table if you have allowed the row to break across pages. "Keep with next" works only between rows, not within rows.
I'm a legal word processor with 25 years of experience in large and small firms, and I have never found the solution to the question of Widow/Orphan protection inside a Table. None of the suggestions on this page cause this function to work inside a Table, and the "work-around" suggestions are unsatisfactory. I keep wondering how long it will be before someone, anyone, at Microsoft will see the wisdom in making this function work inside a Table.
What you can do is clear the option to "Allow row to break across pages" for all table rows (on the Row tab of the Table Properties dialog box).
Alternatively, if this is a large table (spanning multiple pages), you may find that applying "Keep with next" formatting to some of the rows will work for you. (You can't do it for all rows, obviously.)
I do not have trouble using the widow/orphan feature outside the table cell. I don't understand why the function does not "play well" within the table cell. It makes my document look very unprofessional having one word hanging at the top of the page because the feature will not function properly.
Thank you for your response.
The reason this will never be implemented in tables is that tables, by their very nature, have text in parallel columns. There is no way to guarantee that the text in one column should break at the same point as the text in other columns. Say you have several two-line paragraphs in one cell and several three-line paragraphs in an adjacent cell. How would you decide where to break the text? This becomes even more complex when cells are merged vertically. The only control you have in tables is to prevent entire rows from breaking and, if necessary, dividing text into multiple rows to control page breaks.
This is the most comprehensive response that I have read so far.
I still wonder why w/o protection could not be calibrated in such a way as to (a) keep only two, not three, lines together, which (b) hit the bottom margin of a page, whether inside a table cell or not?