Word: How to stop a long table from starting on a new page but instead automatically break at the bottom of a page

Question

In a recent update to Word for Office 365, the behaviour of long tables appears to have changed. In the past, if a table did not start at the beginning of a page and was very long, it would automatically break at the bottom of the page and continue on the next page. But now, if a table is too long to fit on the remaining space on a page, it automatically migrates to start at the top of the next page. This can be manually "fixed" by adding a page break in the table, but if the table content is then changed, the page break may well need moving manually. This is far from ideal; I'd like to be able to specify that the page break should be inserted automatically. (In my current situation, the page begins with a title and then the table begins; the page then ends up almost entirely blank.)

I couldn't find an option to enable this behaviour. Setting the option "Allow row to be broken across pages" made no difference. Either I've missed something (please let me know if I have!) or there's a need for a new option like "Start table on new page if too long for current page".

Answer 1

The problem is that — somehow — the Repeat as Header Row at the top of each page property had been applied to all rows. To correct it, select the entire table then go to Table Properties for Row & clear the check box for that property. If the first row needs to be repeated make sure only that row or a cell within it is selected when applying the repeat property.

BTW: There is a bunch of empty paragraphs [¶] following the title. Apparently the return key was used to force vertical spacing. That can contribute to or cause a number of editing obstacles & should be avoided.

Space Before/After paragraph formatting is far preferable. For a title page it may be even better to set the page off with a Section Break & apply Center Vertical Alignment [Format> Document - Page] to that Section. Both methods can be used together if desired.

Answer 2

The first thing to check is the following: Click inside the table. On the Table Layout tab, click Table Properties. Verify that Text wrapping is set to "None" and click OK.

If the Text wrapping is set to "Around," the placement of a table which is larger than the page will be less flexible.

Note that the screen shot below is from Word for Windows.

Answer 3

I fixed what appeared to be the same issue as described by the OP by selecting the whole table and clicking the "Clear All Formatting" button in the Home > Font section of the toolbar. It seems that cleared some formatting that I was unable to clear by any of the above methods.

I tried first just clearing the font formatting in the header row only and this immediately moved that row to the previous page. As I applied it to the next row the same thing happened, so I then selected the whole table and cleared the font formatting. I was then able to reformat the text as I wanted, and also apply the "Repeat as header row" table setting to the top row only without undoing the fix.

Answer 4

What is the specific Version Number of your Office software?

I'm running 16.102.1 & cannot reproduce what you're describing. As shown in this screenshot I added a title then inserted a 50 row table. The table filled the same page & broke onto the next as expected.

As Stefan requested, a sample file illustrating the issue would be most helpful.

Answer 5

I have the same issue. When I have headings as the first column inside the table, the whole table starts on the next page. See the screenshots.