Adobe Table was pretty poor, but I think I have some info on it at home. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for BT to activiate my ADSL so it may be a couple of days before I find what info I have and paste it up.

I'm sure there was a registry hack to resolve the error you refer to, probably by giving the local user full edit rights to ther relevant lines in the Registry.  However, you will need to be at least a local administrator to edit the resgistry.

I rarely used AT3 but:

1. There was an update to 3.04 which cured a few minor things. If you're not u sing 3.04 you need to download and install it from the PM updates: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=34&platform =Windows  (I've just seen the date of it - 1997! It's 12 years old for gawd's sake, so you probably have it)

2. OLE is a disaster waiting to happen anyway

3. I think it's possible to save the table in EPS (preferred) or WMF (no good for PDFs) and then place it into PM.

Iechyd da! John
16:56 06/07/2009 BST

Apologies for the delay in replying - my internet connection is now running reliably at a  full  8Mb - whoopee!!

It seems Adobe Table Editor will not run correctly or at all if the user has a Restricted Account on WinXP.

Errors such as:

"Initialisation of OLE 2 failed" or Error writing to registration database" while loading occur.

 

They may be followed by request to make a report to Microsoft.

The solution appears to be for the Administrator to use RegEdt32 to give "Everyone" full control to the following keys in the Registry:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{60CED040-7835-11cf-8D64-000021508639}

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.tbl HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.tml

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AdobeTable3

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AdobeTable3.TableObject

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AdobeTable3.TemplateObject

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\Table30.exe

by selecting: Permissions -> Security -> Everyone -> Full control

Re-boot the PC when you have made all the changes. Note: always backup the Registry before making alterations.

---

On 25th May '05, Adobe issued Document 328878 about Adobe Table errors:

Error "Cannot Flush Volume" when you export a table as EPS (Adobe Table 3.0x on Windows)

Make sure your default printer is a PostScript Printer. Note that the printer hardware does not actually have to be attached to the computer.

Be sure you have downloaded the latest update to Adobe Table Editor (3.04). Users have reported version 3.05, but this not available for download, probably being bundled with PM7.0.2. The differences between 3.04 and 3.05 do not appear to be significant.

Save your tables as EPS (File -> Export -> Graphic -> EPS (Don't include fonts)), then use File>Place to bring those EPS into PageMaker. This is the least problematic option when creating PDFs.

Do not copy/paste or Insert Object from Table to PageMaker. You may not only experience the same moving, cropping, or disappearing problem Excel and Word users encounter, but will find creating PDFs problematic.

 

Hope this helps.

Iechyd da! John
221:04 11/07/2009 BST

Great - I'm pleased you could read it OK; it was a royal pain selecting and converting the text from a large PDF!

Iechyd da! John
16:56 12/07/2009 BST

I remember having used Adobe Table two or three times, but it was cumbersome, not at all flexible, and the tables produced were not especially good looking, at least for my taste. For these reasons, all the many tables I had to make afterwards in PageMaker were made enterely by hand.