Writer: How to change Table names from the default Table1, Table2, etc

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LibreOffice 26.2.1.2 running under Win11. Previous versions also had this issue which is why I upgraded to the latest LibreOffice version but this issue persists.

I change my table names and save the file, but when I reload my file all my new Table names are gone and the Tables revert to the default Table1, Table2, etc.

Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?

And let me guess… you are saving to one of the external formats that can’t hold all of Writer features, like DOCX?

E.g., Word has no “table name” feature. The closest thing is its “Alt text” (which Writer lacks):

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But that’s different: Writer’s name is e.g. for cross-table calculation.

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Thanks mikekaganski & keme1 - yes, that’s my issue, I’m saving to a docx format because I use MS Office on my work laptop and LibreOffice on my personal and sometimes port over docs I started in LibreOffice into MS Office so I like to make docs somewhat compatible.

I didn’t realize that MS Office lacked this Table naming feature. Thanks for the quick response!

The usual reason for lost content/structure in a document is that you save your document to a file format which is not native to the application.

  • For Writer, the “correct” choice is to save as ODF text document (*.odt).
  • The most common mistakes are to save in the Microsoft defined formats for Word (*.doc or *.docx)

In cases where this becomes an issue, either the file format does not have a provision for saving table names (or whatever else be the issue) or the application just does not support it.

My guess is that you saved your document as a Word ooxml (*.docx) file.


Edit: … and @mikekaganski already explained that :slight_smile: