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Extra lines within a table border

Anonymous
2013-01-14T11:43:31+00:00

I converted an Office 2007 table to Office 2010 in Word, and some (not all) of the cells in the tables within the document ended up with extra lines (like border or underscore lines) inside the borders of the cell.  For example, I have single line borders turned on for all cells.  Some of the table cells with data ended up with an extra line inside the cell boundaries, both top and bottom, slightly away from the cell borders (but not on the right or left sides), that do not extend all the way to the right or left edges of the cell.  Also, even if the cell is, say, 15 characters wide and there are only 2 characters in the cell (left justified), the extra lines extend (almost) the entire width of the cell.  If I add extra paragraph marks within the cell, the extra lines stay near the top and bottom of the cell, but do not repeat for each individual paragraph mark within that cell.  I can't find any feature in the Tables dialogue box that is different for cells or differences in the text/paragraph formatting with these extra lines and those that do not have them.  How do I get rid of the extra lines without retyping the contents?  The document has [Track Changes] "on" and it will be difficult to retype the info with the very involved change tracking.  Thanks for any responses.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-01-15T17:16:39+00:00

    Got it fixed.  Later changes to the document ended up causing the same problems in all of my tables, not just one.

    But, we figured out how to fix it, even if we still don't understand what caused the problem.

    The problem was that each paragraph within the tables had it's own border applied separate from the cell border of the table.  I ended up having to place the cursor in the text of a cell, then click on the Borders icon, pick the top border or bottom border as applicable.  But I had to click the top or bottom border TWICE for each paragraph to get the offending line to disappear.  Hitting it a third time caused the border of the table cell to disappear also, so I did not do that.  Unfortunately, I had to do this to every cell individually, one at a time, once for the top and again for the bottom.  Tedious, but it cleaned up the problem

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-01-02T00:39:54+00:00

    Check the height of the rows in the table.

    I had a table which started with 3 rows: #1 Title row (text only in a merged cell); #2 Header row (shaded); and #3, the first content row. When I increased the size of the font in row #1, it caused an additional border line to appear right under the text of row #2.

    I was able to get rid of the extra line by increasing the row height of row #2, but that caused the shaded border to be too large.

    Then I checked the row height of row #1 and it was 0.01" ... way too small and not sure how it got that setting. By increasing the height of row #1 to 0.2" the issue was fixed.

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  2. Suzanne S Barnhill 277.2K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2013-01-15T18:22:03+00:00

    You should have been able to do this for all the table cells at once by selecting the table content (excluding the end-of-row markers and the end-of-table marker) and selecting No Border on the Borders dropdown menu.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-01-14T14:52:43+00:00

    Thanks.  Changing the Border settings had no affect on the extra lines.  I broke down and totally recreated the the table from scratch, and then went back and applied all of the Track Changes histories again.  Painful, but at least it's done.  I still don't know what happened.

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-01-14T13:38:48+00:00

    Try selecting the cell/cells with the dark border lines, right click and select “Table Properties.” At “ Table Properties” window click on “Borders and Shading” button. Remove dark borders and apply correct border.

    If that does not work, you may have to Copy and Paste a correct formatted cell into the cell with the dark lines. If you do this, you may want to first copy and paste the cell’s contents into another cell so that you can insert it back in after the cell is corrected. You may want to create another copy of the document before editing.

    This may sound a bit complicated, but sometimes it is the only solution.

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