Lock a Table to the bottom of the Last page?

[DBD]

I'm a mid level word user, not a MVP but not a beginner either...I want to
lbe able to ock a table’s position to the bottom of the last page in a
document.

I often use electronic forms created in Word 2002 that we have set up in our
company to type miscellaneous correspondence. At the bottom of each form
there is a custom table we created that lists the distribution of the
document to the various parties, and we intend for this table to be on the
last page of the document above the footer, whether it is a one page document
or a 10 page document, and it should always be at the bottom of the last page
no matter how much text is on the last page.

I aslo don't want it to mess up the bottom margin, i.e. the first page of a
two page document should have text all the way to thebottom of the page minus
the footer, no matter that the table for distribution is not there. The last
page would be limited only the amount of text that can be inserted above the
table, but the bottom margin would be the same.

I can't seem to figure out how to set this table up to automatically shift
to the bottom of the next page when the amount of text typed on the first
page exceeds the capacity of one page and starts a second page.

Typing the text above the table allows me to "Fake" this by hitting enter
until the box moves to the bottom, but then if I add text to the document it
shifts to a blank page unless I go back in an delete the multiple returns or
"blank" paragraphs.

I don’t want to place it in the footer section as we already have a custom
footer that has other information that is repeated on every page so I could
not select this to be only on the last page unless there is something that I
don’t know about creating a footer that is unique only to the last page. I
see that you can make on unique to the first page or odd even, but not only
the last.

Anyone have a solution or a tip that could help me accomplish this goal?

Thanks.

 

[Tony Jollans]

You can arrange for something - even a table - to be subject to a page
number check in a footer.

Using Ctrl+F9 to enter the braces put this in your footer just above the
rest of the content ...

{ If { Page } = { NumPages } "" }

Then copy your table and paste it between the quotes.

The table should only then appear in the footer, and consequently at the
bottom, of the last page.

 

[DBD]

Tony thanks for the help, but I tried it and could not get it to work... I
inserte the string you typed, then the table between the quotes and the text
string in the brackets prints on the bottom of the page... I would like not
to do the table in the footer, is ther another way to relegate the table to
the bottom of the last page?

 

[TedMi]

... I would like not
to do the table in the footer, is ther another way to relegate the table to
the bottom of the last page?

DBD: If you want to relegate something to the bottom of a page, Word's
mechanism for doing that is the footer. It *will* work if you use Ctrl-F9 to
insert each pair of braces, not type them from the keyboard.

 

[Tony Jollans]

Two possibilities.

Did you insert the braces with Ctrl+F9? You must do this, you can't type
them (they're not really braces - they just show like that).

If yes, you need to toggle field cosde display with Alt+F9 to hide the code
and show the result.

Sorry - I don't know any other way to force something to the bottom of the
last page.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Did you use Ctrl+F9 to insert each pair of braces? These field delimiters
cannot be typed from the keyboard.

 

[DBD]

Thanks everyone for the tip regarding the field delimiters. I was not aware
of these, and it does wotk, evidently I failed to insert one set of the
braces when I first tried it th efirst time. And the toggle between the code
showing or not was helpful also.

Thanks again.

 

[DBD]

*UPDATE* I just remembered after I got the field delimiters and the codes to
work with the table in the footer why I did not want the table in the
footer... Let me explain and see if this issue can also be resolved.

The footer of all of our office forms is set to display fields or typed text
that we don’t want the majority of the users to edit. i.e. office job
number, client name, copyright information and the standards like the time
and date printed, page numbers etc.

The table that I want at the bottom of each page is a table where the users
will need to edit the cells to include those parties the document should be
distributed to. i.e. they need to type in the names and organizations the
document will be sent or copied to for a record of who received the file.

When I protect the document, which we do with all our forms, the footer
along with the table and all of its cells are also protected thus if you
don’t know the password of the forms you cannot edit it. So although this
does work, it will not be acceptable to not be editable. (there’s probably a
way to make it editable, nut read on I think I got it without putting it into
the footer…)

I tried to insert a text form field into the table in the footer so it could
be edited even with the document protected, however you cannot insert a text
form field in a footer according to the error message I received when I
attempted this.

So I went about it another way… Tables allow you to uncheck the box that say
“move object with text†in the table positioning dialog box, like images or
embedded excel file s do, so I did this, then moved it to the bottom of the
page where I wanted it along with the delimiter string using the Ctrl-F9
command.

It seems to work now, the table automatically shifts to the bottom of the
last page of every document I have set up like this so far… Although I
haven’t done everyone like this yet so their may be some weird things that
happen as I do this.

Thanks for everyone’s help again.