Hi Tony,

Your analysis is better than anything I've read anywhere. Probably, =
you'll have to avoid mixing AutoFormat and table styles if you don't =
want an unholy mess. To do MS justice, it's probably not possible to =
introduce something like table styles without creating backward =
compatibility problems. You can blame them, though, on not treating the =
issue in the help files, or not updating the help pages on AutoFormat to =
discourage its use, or for muddying the waters by not renaming "Table =
AutoFormat" to "Table Table styles".

When using table styles (a couple of times), I usually regretted it. =
Apart from the problems Jean-Guy mentioned, all tables sometimes =
suddenly changed their formats because the table style corrupted. And =
since I didn't find any way to fix the corruption, I had to reformat =
dozens and dozens of tables by hand, or revert to an older backup.=20

Since time immemorial (well, Word 6 or so), I've used macros to apply =
formats to tables. I haven't used AutoFormat for tables, since that had =
no advantage over my macro solutions (no automatic update on changes =
without re-applying the AutoFormat respectively re-running the macro), =
but a few disadvantages (mostly: not as flexible). Until I have more =
confidence in table styles, I'll test them on unimportant docs only.

Regards,
Klaus