Monday, May 17, 2010

How to fix Microsoft Word problem where text in last row of a table disappears

I have relied heavily on Googling for fixes to all of Microsoft Word's irritating glitches and bugs, so I am doing some "giving back" here.

I'm using Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac, and I kept having text inside the last row of a table go invisible. It's there sort of, it shows up in the Print Preview, and strangely the last line of the text in each cell of that row CAN be seen. I even tried making my table in another document, then copying and pasting it over and the text still vanished upon pasting. I saw some people complaining about this online but no fixes.

My eventual solution was to insert another row below the bottom one and make its height as small as I could. (0.2") As soon as the offending row was not the last, the text came back. If your table has a border, you may have to get rid of it around just those cells. In fact, for me that screwed up the rest of my borders, so I had to make those borders the same as my background color (white in this case) so the last row could not be seen.

I also noticed a bizarre bug where only the CENTER cell of my last row then looked like the text was doubled up, making it look bold. My table was inside of a text box, and when I stretched the bottom of the text box to accommodate the bigger table, that problem disappeared too.

There you go internet: another tip for coping with Word. Perhaps someone will find this and it will save them a few hours of headache.