From your entire description, my best guess on what's been
happening is that it all depends on what part of the table
structure is storing the formatting information. It may also
be a function of how much of the text (percentage) of what
you're copying/pasting is formatted in what way. And also
how the formatting instructions are stored in the target
area, and how they coincided (or didn't) with the formatting
coming in.

Heh. Lovely. LOL!

Just to complicate things even further, in order to be
"user-friendly", tables have behavior patterns such as
carrying across the formatting of the preceding row when you
insert a new row (or rows).

Argh! Yes! I ***hate*** that! Along with all the "auto" stuff. I know
why behaviour is tending in that direction (target audience factors),
but it's incredibly annoying for control freaks who know exactly what
they want to do and don't appreciate other things happening without
direction. We should at least be able to turn *all* that nonsense off,
instead of only bits of it! (I'd better stop ranting now. If I start
listing the "user friendly" features that really get up my nose this
group will probably need to be moved to a new server!)

Taken all together, I can see where what you describe could
happen.

Yeah. So can I, I guess.

Did you try using the Paste Options buttons at all to
reject/retain formatting?

Nope. I absolutely loathed them and I'm a "keyboard person" (i.e. mouse
hater) too, so they were one of the first things I turned off after
installing Office 2003. To save my colleagues from all the profanity,
basically.

As to the font size: yes, there are some odd things happening in
table styles with certain font sizes. No question. My only advice
in this respect would be to
- format the tables with the default table style (whichever you've
selected)
- make absolutely sure that the font and font size of this style
corresponds to the default font size of the Normal style (Times
New Roman 12, I believe)

I believe, if that is the case, the formatting you apply will have
a better chance of overriding that of the table style.

Thanks. This, and the other information in your messages, is useful
background to know.

If I'm desperate I'll try the above suggestion, but I still don't want
to use either table styles or the Normal paragraph style at all so I'll
experiment with other approaches first. I'm pretty sure documents based
on my old Office 97 templates have well-behaved paragraph styles in
tables, so perhaps I can find a combination of Compatibility options
that doesn't take me quite so far back into the dark ages.

Thanks again!

SF