Word Tables

I hate Word tables.

I have never had much luck getting Word tables to cooperate with me. Either they fall completely off the page, or the column width gets all jacked up.

I have, however, found a few useful workarounds for this problem:

1) Convert the table to text. Get anywhere in the table, and click on the Table menu. Choose Convert, and then "Table to Text." That will often take care of the problem; you can use tabs to get the text looking how you want. Once you've done that, reverse the steps: Table->Convert->Text to Table. Make sure you use "Tabs" as your delimeter. That might work.
2) Instead of two tables on the same page with different column widths, experiment with splitting cells. On a row where you need more cells, right-click in one of the cells, and choose "Split Cells." You get prompted whether you want to create multiple columns, rows, or both.
3) Use #2 in conjunction with merged cells. Same deal; highlight the two or more cells, right-click, and choose "merge."
4) When all else fails, highlight the table, cut it, and paste the damn thing into Excel. Get it just right there. Then paste back into Word.

None of those solutions are perfect by any means. But the splitting and merging cells is the best I've found so far. Sure beats setting tab stops for stuff like phone lists, resumes, and any other document where structured data is at a premium.