No, there's no easy way to make this work. You could embed Excel tables!

The difference between Word and Excel here is that in Excel, the cell has an
absolute existence, so that internal references can be maintained whatever
you do. Word, however is, as you say, text-based. So cross-references
(Bookmarks) are to *text* not to locations. So if you delete the text, the
reference is gone. Which is a damned nuisance for purposes like yours.





"Reg" wrote in message
...
Hi everyone.

I have a document with 4 tables. I'll call them T_1, T_2, T_3 & T_4.
Imaginitive, I know !

T_1, cells B1, C1, D1 & E1 (B1:E1) have text in them.

I would like the text in cell B1 of T_1 to appear in cell A2 of T_2, T_3 &
T_4.
I would like the text in cell C1 of T_1 to appear in cell A3 of T_2, T_3 &
T_4.
I would like the text in cell D1 of T_1 to appear in cell A4 of T_2, T_3 &
T_4.
I would like the text in cell E1 of T_1 to appear in cell A5 of T_2, T_3 &
T_4

This document will get used many times and the contents of T_1, cells
B1:E1
will be overwritten each time the document is used, maybe even deleted by
some users when they use the document.

I did make this work by putting text in the cells T_1 B1:E1 and using 4
different bookmarks to bookmark the text in these 4 cells and then using a
REF field in the appropriate cells of the other 3 tables. It worked until
I
deleted the text in T_1 B1:E1 when I went to re-use the document. If the
text in the cell is deleted when trying re-use the document, the bookmark
is
lost and the "REF" field doesn't work.

I need a way to identify the content of cells B1:E1 in T_1, rather than
the
specific text in the cells.

Formulae can do this using (T_1 B1) but this only seems to work for
numeric
entries in the cells. I want to be able to use a reference like this when
the contents of the cell is text.

I tried using the "Table" type in Cross-reference hoping it would allow me
to identify the contents of a cell but I can't find a description of how
it
works and I can't make it work by hacking.

This seems trivial and it's driving me crazy. Funnily enough , Excel, the
application designed to work with numbers, does this easily, but Word, the
application designed to work with text, doesn't seem to have a simple
mechanism for achieving this !

If you have any ideas how to make this work, I sure would like to hear
from
you.

Thanks.