Table set to autofit in footer keeps vibrating...

[Kind writer/user/programmer]

Because some pages in my doc are landscape and others are portrait, I need a
footer that more or less automatically resizes: tab settings tend to create
footer that are either too narrow for one seciont or to wide for another.

I created a one row, 5-cell table defined as autofit to window so that it
would span the page margin-to-margin. This seemed marvelous at first, but it
started jumping back and forth to different sizes at about 3 cycles per
second.

So, then I tried breaking the footer links between portrait and landscape
sections, adding about 5 footers to maintain in a 90 page doc. However, this
did not resolve the auto-resize issue at all, any given footer continues to
"resize," giving the appearance of "vibrating."

How to fix this so doc displays in a stable fashion.

 

[Jezebel]

Forget the autosize table. Having broken the footer links between sections,
simply format each footer, using tabs, for the page width of that section.

 

[Genine]

We had this problem one place I worked at. Users could not switch off the
autofit setting in the table as the footers were locked in code to prevent
users from inserting anything that didn't conform to house style.
The only way round it was to work in normal layout so you didn't see the
footers.
Don't know if that helps.
Genine

 

[Jezebel]

There's no way to 'lock footers in code' -- what had they actually done?

 

[Genine]

They used a variety of measures including resetting the footer content to
standard housestyle settings each time you saved, printed, previewed or
opened the document, which was all done in code.

Although technically not a "lock" the effect was the same - you couldn't
print or save your footer changes to the document.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Probably protected the document for forms.

 

[Genine]

I don't know because I didn't have the vba or forms passwords for the global
templates, but how it was done isn't really relevant to the question that was
originally asked. The point was, that the only way to stop the annoying
resizing of the tables in the footers was to work in Normal layout view so
that the footers weren't visible. I don't know if that suggestion is
acceptable to kinduser, but it's something to consider.

Genine

 

[Kind writer/user/programmer]

Thank you Genine, Susan and Jezebel--

I'm the point man for designing the VBA to handle the departmental/corporate
standards.
If Jezebel would help me appreciate why I should "dump the table idea" it
would improve my academic grasp of Word and VBA--surely there's a logical
technical explanation.
I'm enamoured of the table solution, using VBA code in two different macros
to set and reset the autofit feature. I'm still in need of a reason that
I've been unsucessful in taming the jumpiness of the footer--the cells seemt
to take on a life of their own.

Setting the table properties as shown below doesn't seem to address
anything. Should I set the table to be something less than 100% the width? Is
that what Word is trying to "fix" ?

SetFooterTableWidth Macro
' Set footer table to span margins, then reset to not auomatically reize.

ActiveWindow.ActivePane.View.NextHeaderFooter
Selection.Tables(1).Select
Selection.Tables(1).AutoFitBehavior (wdAutoFitWindow)
Selection.Tables(1).Select
With Selection.Tables(1)
.TopPadding = InchesToPoints(0)
.BottomPadding = InchesToPoints(0)
.LeftPadding = InchesToPoints(0.08)
.RightPadding = InchesToPoints(0.08)
.Spacing = 0
.AllowPageBreaks = True
.AllowAutoFit = False
End With
With Selection.Cells(1)
.BottomPadding = InchesToPoints(0)
.FitText = False
End With
End Sub

 

[Jezebel]

The problem with the table is that it causes your footer to 'vibrate'. If
you use tabs, that won't happen.

 

[Genine]

Or you can keep the tables in the footers, but do two things, (1) switch off
same as previous and (2) remove the autofit setting, and manually set the
table width for each section footer so that it fits the page orientation.

It is the autofit setting that's causing the "jumping" behaviour. As a
general rule, autofitting tables is a bad idea. Word has to work very hard
behind the scenes to update the display all the time, particularly when you
are in print layout and scrolling down a long document with a mixture of
landscape and portrait sections.

If you need to automate this then, it isn't too much of a problem to write
two macros - one to insert a correctly sized table into the footer for a
portrait page and one larger one for a landscape page, if you use mixed
layouts regularly.

Genine