Keeping Tables on One Page

This does not work

As you develop more complex Word documents, it is inevitable that you will add tables. Most tables are relatively short and can easily fit on a page. Because of this, it can be disconcerting to have a page break occur in the middle of a table. Here's an approach that has always worked for me:
1.Select all the rows in the table.
2.Display the Home tab of the ribbon.
3.Click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Paragraph group. Word displays the Paragraph dialog box.
4.Make sure the Line and Page Breaks tab is selected. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Line and Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog box.
5.Make sure the Keep Lines Together check box is selected.
6.Click on OK.

Now you need to repeat the same steps, with two minor variations. First, in step 1 select all the rows except the last one. Then, in step 5, make sure the Keep With Next check box is selected. This is necessary (performing this step with the last row not selected) so that the table stays together as a unit, rather than the table staying with the paragraph that follows it.

For a table smaller than a page, 'Keep Lines Together' did NOT work for me. However, 'Keep with Next', worked great, it started the table on the next page.

This article is NOT correct. If the table will not fit on the page, Word will ignore one or the other of the "Keep with next" or "Keep lines together settings"

You can prevent a row from breaking across a page by unchecking the "Allow row to break across page" setting in the Table Properties dialog and by doing that with a one-row table, you can force it to be kept on one page, but if there is too much text to fit, the excess will not be visible.

Word will ignore either the Keep lines together" or the "Keep with next" settings for text in paragraphs that are not inside a table and the text will wrap to the next page, regardless of those settings if it will not all fit on one page.

This tip doesn't seem to work when there is a footer at the bottom of the page where the table is splitting (in Word 2007). Any ideas for how to get around this?

Great tip. Many thanks.

Tried this on 2013, I'm afraid it didn't work.

Cheers

Andrew

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Works like a charm.

Thanks! This has bugged me for years. I can't believe it is so labourious to do what should be a simple option (in the table formatting box)

This tip was awesome and quick, thank you.

@Doug: I have always used this technique myself, and it has always worked for me. Notice that the article is about tables that DO fit on a single page. If the table start very close to the end of one page, however, you might get a page break within the table, which is bad. Using the paragraph options as described in this article, the table will move to the top of the next page (where it will fit by assumption).

This article is not correct.

See comments on the corresponding article for earlier versions of Word by clicking on the link at the note at the top of the article.

Thanks for the tip!