Keeping a table together on one page

I'm starting a table near the bottom of a page, so I'd rather have the entire table on the next page instead of being broken over two pages (it's not too long to all fit on one page). Is there any way to do that without inserting a manual page break?

Article contributed by Suzanne S. Barnhill

It's best to avoid manual page breaks in documents wherever possible, and luckily this is usually easy to do with paragraph formatting:

• In Word 2003 and earlier, use Format | Paragraph (or Paragraph… on the shortcut menu) to open the Paragraph dialog. Select the Line and Page Breaks tab.

• 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.

On the Line and Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog are several options that control text flow:

• “Widow/Orphan control” prevents a single line of a paragraph from being left alone at the top or bottom of a page. This property is enabled by default for all styles in Word.

• “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.

• “Page break before” causes a page break before the paragraph. Unlike a manual page break inserted using Ctrl+Enter, however, it is not represented visually in the document and does not inherit the properties of the following paragraph.

By judicious application of the first three properties, you can usually maneuver Word into putting a page break where you want it without having to insert a manual page break or use “Page break before.”

Note: Whenever you have “Keep with next,” “Keep lines together,” “Page break before,” or “Suppress line numbering” enabled for a given paragraph, you will see a small black square bullet in the left margin. If you double-click on this bullet, you will open the Paragraph dialog with the Line and Page Breaks tab displayed.

For an easier way to apply these properties to paragraphs, you can (in Word 2003 and earlier) add toolbar buttons for them. Unfortunately, these buttons by default have no button icon. For an add-in that contains these buttons with attractive icons, see “Custom Toolbar Buttons.”

Things work a little differently in tables, however. In a table, the “Keep lines together” and “Widow/Orphan control” properties have no effect at all. To keep a table together on one page, you must perform two actions:

1. Prevent rows from breaking internally.

• In Word 97 and earlier, open the Table | Cell Height and Width dialog and select the Row tab. Clear the check box for “Allow row to break across pages.”

•  In Word 2000, 2002, and 2003, open the Table | Table Properties dialog and select the Row tab. Clear the check box for “Allow row to break across pages.”

• In Word 2007, on the Table Tools | Layout tab of the Ribbon, locate the Table group and click Properties. In the Table Properties dialog, select the Row tab. Clear the check box for “Allow row to break across pages.”

Note: The choice of whether rows are allowed to break is strictly an either/or proposition. If you do allow a row to break, it can break anywhere; as mentioned, “Widow/Orphan control” and “Keep lines together” are ignored, so the only way to force a table to break only between paragraphs is to make sure each paragraph is in a separate row.

2. Keep rows together. Select the entire row and enable the “Keep with next” property. Do this for every row of the table except the last.

Although it is not relevant to a one-page table, note that “Page break before,” when applied to a table row, does not split a table as a manual page break (inserted with Ctrl+Enter) does. This means that repeating heading rows will continue to be repeated and the table can continue to be treated as a single table. For information on controlling page breaks in tables longer than a page, see “How do I control where the page breaks will fall in a table that extends over several pages?”