Hi Cindy,

Thanks for your reply! (and please excuse this long-winded one)

If I guessed that the tables exhibiting the "bizarre" behavior
you describe were created in paragraphs formatted with a different
stlye, and that this is the style that shows up when your
paragraph styles change, would I be on the right track?

Only a little bit, unfortunately!

Some of the tables exhibiting bizarre behaviour were created in
paragraphs formatted with a style other than Normal, but others were
created in paragraphs formatted with Normal but then changed to a style
other than Normal (more on that below). They actually *all* exhibit the
same bizarre behaviour: it's just not predictable (more on that below
too).

Also, the non-Normal style was *not* the one that showed up when my
paragraph style changed... if it had been, all would have been OK!

Here's a more detailed description of what happened...

The document I was setting up was originally going to be a simple,
standalone questionnaire. This is not the sort of document I usually
do, so I didn't have a suitable existing template. I started with a
blank document, and immediately inserted a table (i.e. the paragraph
style at the place where I insert the table was Normal). The
just-created table's cells were formatted with the Table Grid table
style. I modified Table Grid's Font and Paragraph settings to suit, and
proceeded to add content.

Part way through this exercise, I had to change the document to a
combination information sheet and questionnaire; the questionnaire
itself became much more complicated too. I now needed several different
types of text, and these needed to be consistent regardless of whether
they were inside or outside tables. Rather than starting from scratch,
I set up a hierarchy of paragraph styles where the usable layer would
give me the characteristics I wanted. I've seen the Normal paragraph
style cause transportability problems in the past and prefer to avoid
it when I'm doing anything even slightly tricky, so the core of my
style hierarchy was a single base style which itself was based on "(no
style)" and was set up completely and explicitly from scratch. This
base style's font size was smaller than the one I'd previously set in
Table Grid, by the way. The reason for the hierarchy was to simplify
maintenance: I knew I'd need to fiddle with things like font size,
leading and paragraph spacing to get the new content to fit nicely, and
the fewer places to change the better. Also, I could do everything I
wanted with paragraph styles, so I no longer wanted to use table styles
at all: I didn't want to have to keep a set of them in synchronisation
too.

I selected my entire document and applied the main paragraph style from
my hierarchy (this is presumably why even tables *created* in
paragraphs formatted with Normal exhibit the same behaviour as tables
created in paragraphs formatted with my main paragraph style). I then
proceeded to expand upon the document's content. This included applying
other paragraph styles in my hierarchy to selected paragraphs inside
table cells, creating other tables, moving rows within and between
tables until things were how I wanted them, adding non-tabular content,
and copying a few tables to other points in the document and then
editing their content as required.

The only problem I noticed at that point was that *some* of the
paragraphs would revert back to Table Grid when I cut/copied and then
pasted the rows in which they resided elsewhere in the document (I only
cut/copied/pasted entire rows). As described in my original post,
sometimes it was the first paragraph in each cell pasted, sometimes the
last, sometimes the first and the last, sometimes all, and on very rare
occasions none of them. I did not notice a pattern to this behaviour,
whether it be location of source cells, location of paste insertion
point, number of cells or rows pasted, paragraph styles present within
the pasted cells/rows, paragraph style at paste insertion point,
paragraph style of reverted paragraphs, or number of columns in the
table. After reading your reply I tested tables created in paragraphs
originally formatted with Normal versus tables created in paragraphs
originally formatted with a style other than Normal, and there is no
pattern there either. (I know there will be a pattern *somewhere*, but
it wasn't and isn't obvious. What is was, was a major pain in the
posterior!)

After an external review of the first draft, I needed to change the
font size and a number of other characteristics of the document such as
line spacing, all of which were defined in my single base (paragraph)
style. I updated my base style accordingly and most of the changes took
effect throughout the document, both outside and inside tables, except
for font size (i.e. the tables picked up other changes made to the base
style such as line spacing).

I used Ctrl+Space and Ctrl+Q on everything to clear any unintended font
and paragraph overrides, but that didn't help. I looked at the font and
paragraph properties within paragraphs in tables, and they showed the
values I expected from my paragraph style although the font size was
clearly visibly different (e.g. when Format|Font showed a size of 10pt,
the text definitely wasn't big enough and was actually only in the 9pt
set in Table Grid -- which I didn't want and which had previously been
overridden by the paragraph styles -- at the time).

The only way I could get the new font size to take effect in tables was
to set that size in the Table Grid table style. (Well, I didn't try
applying the size directly to the text as a character override
(blech!), but I tried just about everything else I could think of.)

So, originally my paragraph styles had a different font size to Table
Grid, and my paragraph styles' font size overrode Table Grid's. After
changing the font size in my base paragraph style to another value that
was also different to that in Table Grid, Table Grid's font size
overrode my paragraph styles' font size.

Later, just as a test, I tried changing the font size in my base
paragraph style back to what it originally was (8pt), which made it
different to what was set in Table Grid at that time. That was OK, i.e.
the paragraph styles' font size overrode Table Grid's. So I tried
changing the font size in my base paragraph style to yet another value
(11pt), and that *wasn't* OK, i.e. I got the size set in Table Grid
instead of the new size I'd set in the paragraph style.

The seemingly random reversion of some paragraphs inside pasted table
rows happens regardless of whether my paragraph styles' font size is
overriding Table Grid's, or Table Grid's is overriding my paragraph
styles'.

Weird.

None of the Compatibility options were selected, by the way.

Anyway, when I have some spare time I'm going to try to figure it all
out using a completely new and very simple document, but the easiest
solution would have been to get rid of table styles altogether. Oh
well...

FWIW, any paragraph style other than Normal should override
table-style specific formatting.

I would have thought so, but that wasn't what was happening. And in
fact, the *same* non-Normal paragraph style sometimes overrode
table-style specific formatting, and sometimes didn't, depending on the
font size I'd set in the non-Normal paragraph style.

But by the same token, you should always create the table in
a paragraph foramtted with the Normal style.

Out of interest, why is this, and does this still apply if one usually
avoids Normal totally? (My past experience with various older Word
versions has been that Normal causes much more trouble than it's
worth!)

Cheers,

SF