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

"Jezebel" wrote:

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



"Kind writer/user/programmer" wrote in
message ...
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