I transcribed Hall's Chronicle (1550) into tables in Word but I only had to create the table once. When I finished a page, I copied it, pasted it below, then highlighted and deleted the text, leaving a blank table. A two-row, multi-column data table at the top of each transcribed page had details on the page, work notes, etc.
Later on, however, when I contemplated using Watt's Concordance, I realized that line numbers wouldn't be adequate by themselves, so I used some macros to add the page numbers. If I were doing running text with continuous line numbers, I'd get Excel to do it automatically, using the Edit / Fill / Series (Column, Linear, 1 to whatever) function, then copy and paste into a Word table.
I faithfully hyphenated as Hall's compositors did but I wish I hadn't, for it hinders searching for those words and would make a Watt-created concordance unreliable. I may spin off one transcription version with hyphenation and create another without broken words.
Cheers, Al Magary