Thanks for responding and being so quick about it. In fact, I was still fixing typos and adding a bit at the end when you replied so you may have missed that bi

Thanks for responding and being so quick about it. In fact, I was still fixing typos and adding a bit at the end when you replied so you may have missed that bit. Very good to hear about the table improvements, I look forward to seeing them. Re ODT, I unzipped it and looked at the XML and the stuff in the table section was formatted so badly (tightly together as one huge blob of text sans proper spaces and structured formatting). Given the ODT is over 900k long and having examined the XML for an hour or so I simply gave up. I hate to think how long it would have taken me to examine it in detail let alone resolve it without me first going crazy. As I was in a desperate hurry I cut my losses and used my time fixing it in a way where I could at least estimate the time required. "the spec for writer documents is sufficiently complex that parts of it are in conflict with itself," This sounds like what was happening, in parts of the table when paging up or down between pages sections of text (both within a cell with multiple lines of text and across cells in lines before and after). Text in a cell would mix and fold over itself or fold over the text in the cell in the line above or below it. Given that some cells could have text of several hundred lines in length sections of the table (but not all of it) became an almighty jumbled mess. Right, at times it just gave up and if it didn't resolve (respond to commands within a minute or so) I killed it with the task manager.