Have you made sure to disable "Define styles based on my formatting" and
"Automatic headings"?

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
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"Aelfgifu" wrote in message
...
I'm at my wits end with tables in Word 2003. I tried formatting my own
table
styles but gave up. Now I use Table Normal plus paragraph styles called
Table
Heading, Table Body and Table Body Small. The problem is that stray
formatting just suddenly appears out of nowhere. To fix it I run macros
that
clear all formatting but that just makes it worse. WHY on EARTH would a
cell
suddenly become tagged with Heading 3?