Thanks, all, for your replies.

The consensus seems to be that Table Styles are a nice idea that simply
isn't yet ready for everyday use. And, reading between the lines a bit, the
reason there is so little information about them anywhere is that they have
been collectively ignored!

It sounds like working with them via the GUI is more trouble than it is
worth, and working with them in code seems to be a non-starter. A shame, as
the idea is a good one.

As I understood it, the situation I was looking at was trying to write code
to pick up what somebody else might have done. The question wasn't one where
you could simply say don't use them, more how would you deal with the case
where somebody else already had used them. It seems that all the styling
characteristics must be individually checked - which I suppose was the case
anyway to do a proper job.

Thanks again for your replies. I shall continue to investigate for it (along
with a completely unrelated issue to do with table placement on the page) has
piqued my interest . Word tables are incredibly flexible and I guess this, in
part, is the reason for them being difficult to work with in code.

Best Regards,
Tony Jollans


"Klaus Linke" wrote:

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.

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