Prevent Microsoft Word from wrapping tables across columns and pages

Question

When writing technical documents, it is often required for tables to not wrap across columns and page breaks, so that all data from a given table are displayed in one place. In LaTeX, there is a setting to prevent tables from wrapping unless they are simply too long to do otherwise. Is there any similar such setting for Word 2010?

I know I can manually insert column and page breaks, but it becomes a hassle to reformat the entire document if I add in two lines of text which bumps two lines of a table over to the next column. I also found an option under Table Properties for "don't break row over pages", but this doesn't seem to do what I want. Is there any other setting that can do this?

Examples:

Bad:

Good:

Answer 1

Based on this guide from the MS Word MVP FAQ site. Quotes are from the article; screenshots were taken for this post.

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.

• “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.

Select both of these properties to force the table to wrap columns or go to the next page if it exceeds the available space.

Now the table behaves as desired:

Answer 2

You could try selecting all the rows of the table, and selecting "Keep with next" on the Line and Page Breaks tab of the Paragraph dialog box, which you can get to by clicking the little arrow-button in the bottom right corner of the Paragraph section on the Home tab.