Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 73698
Tables from Ms Word breaks across columns for no reason
Last modified: 2013-08-07 14:38:26 UTC
Test with Word97 and with Word2003 on XP and with OOo2.1 Situation: Pages with 3 Columns. Each column is getting filled with a two column table in Ms Word. Tables represent months with their dates. No column or page breaks used. After opening the document in OOo 2.1 on page2 the Table is split for no apparent reason between row 10 and 11, causing the layout to be badly disrupted. The split is bad that it happens even when deleting the contents of the cells and surrounding paragraph, suggesting that there is something happening in the table... The workaround - for advanced users - is in this case: On the split table: Table Properties > Tab [Text Flow] > uncheck 'Allow table to split across tables and columns. Strangely: setting this setting back to it's original setting does NOT split the table again. Also an undo is powerless. Some research brought up a hint that: Word only has the 'Allow row to break' option for table properties. OOo has the 'Allow table to split' AND 'allow row to break' option. A silly hack could be to set the 'allow table to break default to off
Created attachment 42341 [details] Word document - with no break between rows
Created attachment 42342 [details] OOo Writer Doc - Table breaks - splits across columns
Created attachment 42343 [details] Setting available in OOo 2.1 in Table Properties
Confirming with OO 2.1 on WinXP - Writer breaks the table on import (on attached screenshot - circled in red, while Word does not - circled in green).
Created attachment 42347 [details] Illustrating screenshot.
MRU->FME: see attached doc. Open in Writer -> the tables on page two will break somewhere in the middle onto the next column though there is enough space in each column. This can be corrected by adding a row to an affected table and then deleting the new row.
I was not able to reproduce this defect on WinXP using OO Build 2.1. I followed the following steps: 1. Run Microsoft Word 2003 and open a new document. 2. Insert three columns (Format ïƒ Columns). 3. Create three tables, one in each column, each with 2 rows and at least 15 columns. 4. Save the file in .doc format and open it in OO Writer. 5. For each table, go to Table ïƒ Table Properties, make sure column or row breaks are allowed. However, although breaks were allowed, none were observed. The only problem seemed to be that the column width was modified so that the edges of the tables exceeded the width of the column. Both empty and filled tables were tested. Also, different number of columns and rows for the tables were tested. I could not reproduce the bug in any of the cases. Although I was able to open the Word file in OO Writer, I could not paste the contents of the Word file in OO Writer without completely losing the format of the tables. When the content is pasted, indeed there is breaks between the rows and the cell size of each table appears larger. No breaks between columns were observed, however. In this case, getting around the problem does not seem apparent, other than manually changing the format of the tables.
Maybe for 3.2?