Manipulating tables and figures in MSword
 

Does anyone have any tricks for putting pictures and tables where you want in a word document? The program continuously jerks them around and makes it generally an unpleasant experience.

MSWord is terrible for this kind of desktop publishing. I tend to do what I think is cheating, which is inserting spaces using the spacebar to move things around.

Can you recommend another (preferably free) software package with which this sort of thing is easier?

Double click the Image and select the Layout tab.

Toy with "Tight" and "Behind Text." You should get what you need, depending on what your need is.

Um, nothing free, but depending on the size of your document, you are looking for something along the lines of Adobe's FrameMaker or InDesign, or maybe just InCopy, which is essentially a word processor, but it uses the same tech as InDesign, as they were made to integrate with one another.

QuarkXpress is another program, but it's bloated and convoluted, overpriced and overkill.

I have no experience or knowledge of it, but there is also the open-source (i.e. free) Scribus. Maybe try that out.

---------- Post added at 02:05 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:03 PM ----------

I should probably also note that desktop publishing suites have a bit of a learning curve, so if what you're doing is rather simple, maybe try Jinn's tip and see if that solves everything.

MS Word is hell on earth, with all its auto-formatting bullshit.

Whenever I have to deal with tables in a Word Document, I always make them in Excel and import them. If I need to edit them, I delete and paste in the new one.

thats is exactly what i do too.

format everything that you want in MS excel, and then import or copy and paste into the MS word document.

Don't forget that you can also import that Excel table as a picture. Usually saves memory and avoids having word reformat it on you.

Open Office is free, and not quite as annoying as MS Word in this instance.