I have seen this and found it most frustrating. I never did have time to
troubleshoot, so I used the best available workaround: if you select just
part of the column and format it, you won't see this behavior; you can then
format the remaining cells. I suspect that it indicates that the document or
table is somehow corrupt, though it's hard to see how this can happen in a
brand-new document. I would think it was a variation on the "Automatic
update" bug (see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting...eformatted.htm), but I
know this was not true in my case.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
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"Opinicus" wrote in message
...
Using Word 2002 in Office XP. All updates in place.

I have a 3 x 56 table in a Word document that is behaving very strangely.
If I select and (say) right-justify any one of the three columns, the
other
two columns are also right-justified even though they're not selected. If
I
try and left-justify one of the columns, all three switch to
left-justification. What could be the cause of this behavior and how can I
fix it? I want the first two columns to be left-justified and the third
right-justified but Word won't let me do it.

--
Bob
http://www.kanyak.com