I have searched this forum and have found very few posts about tables, so I am left wondering whether it’s simply a well known fact that DTP tables should be avoided altogether (or only used for toy tables) or I am missing a key feature that would save me hours of anger and frustration on a regular basis.
If I work on moderately-sized tables (say, about 60 rows, 5 columns) for some time I am almost sure that at some point just by clicking on one of the cells of the table (I still haven’t figured out what I do differently that time, if the click was closer to a border, but it eventually will happen) I will see one or more cells disappear so that my table is not a regular 60x5 anymore, but a least one row now only has 4 or fewer columns
(1) I can’t stretch defective rows to have the same length as the rest of the table and then split cells because the whole table stretches.(2) I can’t seem to be able to undo any table formatting operation(3) I certainly can’t copy and paste multiple cells of a table
So every time this happens, and this happens often, I have to create a new table and copy all the cells one by one. By the time I am done I generally don’t have too many polite things to say about DTP.
Am I being an idiot because one of solutions 1-3 is in fact feasible and I don’t see it, or being an idiot because I keep using a feature of DTP (tables) that everybody else has given up for serious use a long time ago?
TiA.
That’s indeed a strange display. As we’ve never received a similar bug report during the last years, is there anything special about your system? Anything logged to the system console (see /Applications/Utilities/Console.app)?
Since I posted my question, I have been thinking more about common circumstances to all these “weird table” problems. I think that one common detail might be the use of the “traditional pinyin” mode of character input. That is, I think that most if not all of the times this happened to me I was editing tables of chinese characters.
Sorry, I deleted my latest such table. And of course, now that I want the problem to occur, I can click on my table as many times as I want and it stays fine. I just need to have a quiet hour to work normally on my tables without thinking about this problem and I know that I will produce another such screwy table (it never fails to happen). Probably tomorrow night. Thank you for the suggestion, though. I will try that.
Unfortunately I just had a similar thing happen in DTP 2.2.1. I set up and was entering text into a 3 column, 50 row table. At some point, the third column cells moved to the first column on all rows except for the second row. The second column remained stable.
I tried dragging the file to the desktop, but it was in rtf format and appeared to have all of the same problems.
I’m going through the same deliberation as mentioned above. . . should I just avoid using tables?
