I've been documenting register layouts in an FPGA.
This calls for a table of registers. Each register gets a row.
Some of the rows need elaboration in the last column. Like, a table of what the bits are.
Last time I did this, a few years back, I used tables within tables. As I recall, MS Word tended to choke on this, and the documents became fantastically brittle.
This time, in OpenOffice, I multiply split the last cell. This works fine, and Word displays it properly.
But!
Some of the register addresses have changed.
In order to keep the document all nice and proper, I want to change the order of the rows, so everything's back in numerical order.
It.
Can't.
Be.
Done.
Neither OpenOffice nor MS Word allows (1) selecting a table row containing split cells, (2) cutting or copying it, and (3) pasting it into another, vanilla-flavored row, and having the cell-splitting come through.
They misbehave in slightly different ways, but neither of them will do it.
Well... mayhap when it's all stabilized, I'll export it as some flavor of XML, edit the XML, then re-import it.
Assuming that the cell-splitting exports and re-imports cleanly. Which, y'know, it should, 'cause that's exactly the kind of formatting that XML oughtta be good at.
But, as I've leaned over the decades: never trust a word processor.
If all else fails, maybe one of the client's office staffers can be press-ganged into recreating the table, sorted.
Update: OK, there is a way to accomplish this, awkward though it be.
The rows can't be moved, but they can be split off as tables unto themselves, which can then be moved around and merged back into one big happy table.
So: split the table between out-of-sequence rows. Cut & paste the little tables until all is in order. Then merge the tables (which is a non-obvious process; details here.)
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