Hi 
This is a public mailing list so it's a bit informal. Hopefully several people will help steer this to arrive at a right answer that suits you. We might have to ask a few 'dumb' questions to try to clarify things along the way. Feel free to do the same.
1. Have you considered using Calc instead? If there is stuff outside of the tables then it might be easier to use Calc and then have text-boxes or "merge cells" to contain the normal text.
2. I take it the size of the table on page 1 grows as stuff is entered into the table? Is that data re-typed in from a printed source? if so it might be possible to get Base (database program) to read that source directly and produce a more dynamic report.
Keeping it in Writer might be best for now though.
I found that i had to delete all the newlines between the 2 tables, so that it looked like they were joined even though they weren't really. Then the "merge tables" options un-"greyed out" and that let me really join the table together.
In my case i had a different number of columns in each table but that didn't seem to worry it at all. Then
Table - Select - table
selected all of both tables.
It might help to toggle the back-to-front P in the toolbar so that you can see all the non-printing characters so that you can see the newline characters that appear when you press Enter. That makes it easier to see what is going on and makes it easier to delete the right things.
The best documentation (imo) is here
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications
There are also video tutorials for this and other OpenSource programs at
http://spoken-tutorial.org/
The quality of the English in the ones i watched was better than that spoken in most places around where i live. There are other guides and Faqs that might also prove useful and there is always the in-built help too (F1 or the Help menu)
Please feel free to write in to the list as soon as a problem arises even before you have had a look around for yourself. Hopefully you might find the answer before we do (by googling it or through documentation or something) and if you do please let the list know the crucial bit of the answer.
Don't worry about switching programs to get the odd one or few things done. During a migration from one program to another it is quite normal to fully understand the old way and not yet be fully familiar with the new one. As time goes on you find less and less need to go back to the old program and may even find yourself batching up a few jobs for final tweaks in the old program.
Most of us have both LO and MS Office on our systems. Often it's just to help out colleagues with their problems when they don't know how to do something in MSO, or to check how things look. Usually it's an old version. Sometimes employers like to buy the newest thing even though we don't really use it. After using LO for even a little while you will probably find that you gain a MUCH deeper understanding of how MSO works and your colleagues will seek your guidance. So, don't worry about them ridiculing you right now, to quote Gandhi "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win".
MS Office doesn't usually allow people to have 2 versions of their Office Suite on the same machine. A normal install will typically wipe out the previous version. So when they try to upgrade to MSO 2013 they will be really stuck with tons of things they don't know how to do and no way of going back to the old version to get them done there. Typically they will need to go off on training courses and all sorts costing either than or the company a lot of money just in order to do what they could do on the older versions. MSO prefers to make people spend money and make life difficult rather than give them an easy migration route.
So, feel free to ask and if you find the answer first then just let us know!
Regards from
Tom
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