I am helping writing a long technical document in Word that will include many tables and multiple references to these in the document. I have heard the best way to make sure these auto-update table number as tables are added and rearranged within the document is to use a combination of table captions and cross reference. Is there a way to do this before actually adding the tables to the document? We generally add the tables as the very last step, but put in table titles as placeholders, and I'd like to cross reference to these titles before adding the tables.

Also, on a partially related issue. We have a specific format we like to use for table titles and references, that looks like this:

Table #
Table Title
Table Subtitle
Table Body
Table Source info and table specific footnotes

So obviously we'd like the table number to be the table caption, and be the only thing that updates, but even if I insert the table first, when I add a table caption it wants the caption to be on the line directly above the table. How do I format so that the table number is the top line?

For many years we have been doing all formatting manually (and have consequently had many formatting errors). This year I'd like to try and introduce a more systematic method for at least part of the document, and thought that introducing styles for tables and cross references would be a good place for people to quickly see the benefits, but it won't work if we are unable to add tables in at the last minute.

One last thing that may or may not be relevant, but because of the size of the tables we use, many tables have to be inserted as a picture instead of as a table. We will want tables to be treated the same whether they are pictures or actual tables (and separately, we will have actual pictures that will need to have a different style and numbering associated with them.

Hope this isn't too many questions at once. For the moment I'm most interested in getting help with the 1st part, but as I started writing I realized I had a number of other questions related to the topic, and figured it would save explanation if they were all asked in the same post.

Thanks as always.

Dylan