I agree, it's not a great solution, because having a table as an image limits its usability a lot, but you know how difficult it is in word (even manually) to align two pictures or table and picture on the same row without it jumping around ...
One other idea would be you force the document to have two columns (if that's even possible, maybe through a template) and have each in one column. I found a post where they managed it for powerpoint: