Hi Suzanne and Stefan,

Thanks for the reference - in fact I was using that article last night
to set up pull quotes in the margin, I didn't think about using it for
these text boxes within the flow of the text. Thanks so much - that is
a beautiful idea (to use a style to place the text in the margin!)

However, I'm still not totally sure on the best way to solve this
problem of having a table inside my box.

I have done a test and set up a style I called "box". This style
creates a frame, that is vertically located at the bottom of the margin
and shaded at 5%.

However, if I create a few paragraphs to put in this box, then add a
table whose width is less than the total margin, then a few more
paragraphs afterwards and put the whole thing as style "box", then
there are weird white spaces at the side margins of the table and the
borders of the frame disappear (just at the table), as in the cheesy
ascii diagram I made above. On the other hand, if I place a picture
inline in the text, the shading flows around the picture w/o problems.
So it seems like there is something special with tables and background
shading and borders. It is possible to put ANYTHING to the left or
right of a table?

Finally, and I think I know the answer to this, if I want to have
bullet points or headings or any other styles within the box, I have to
create a NEW style, right? I guess this would require nested styles
otherwise.