[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You can designate any table style you prefer as your default table style for
a give template. New tables inserted in documents based on that template
will use that style.

Table Normal (which has no borders) is actually a different style from Table
Grid. Table Normal cannot be modified.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

"Jules" wrote in message
...
Yes Brian Table Grid uses Table Normal Style that is a default system
style- any new tables you create will follow the format you set with that.

If that works for your purposes having every new table with this Table
Normal Style great.

I use base Table Grid (modified for all my default tables) which resides
in Normal.dot or Normal.dotx but keep it very basic as tables are used in
1000s of documents in many different ways every day and not all documents
require the exact same table layout (borders being one of them)- tables
can be very complex with merged cells and some rows have 1 column, some
rows have 3 columns and so on - so the method of duplicating a row with
format by moving to the table marker outside the row end and pressing
return is the quickest way to duplicate a row for a user to add new
information in the appropriate table row format.

Glad you resolved your problem.

"Brian Murphy" wrote in message
...
Table styles are something I've never paid any attention to before, so
I don't really understand them.

I'm not sure, but I think all my tables are using a style called
"Table Grid". I suppose this is one of Word's default built in
styles.

It looks the contents of each individual table cell also get to be
assigned a paragraph style. I'm not sure how the style for the table,
and the style for the cell, work together to produce the final
result. I'll worry about that later.

Anyway, I just tried the following:

Selected the entire last row of one of my tables.
Did "modify style" for the "Table Grid" style.
Set "no border" for the last row only.

It works! All the tables throughout the document now have their last
row with no borders.

If I go to the last cell of each table and press Tab, an empty row is
added in the usual way, and is identical the row above it, but it has
no borders. So I can delete my empty paragraph after my table.

Unless I run into problems, this is going to be my approach to doing
tables from now on.

Cheers,

Brian