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#1
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bewildered by table styles
From the 'Styles and Formatting' task pane, I have set up a new 'Table Style'.
However the options available in the "Modify Style" dialogue simply do not seem to work: for instance, if I select "Apply formatting to: Whole table", and specify a font to apply throughout (Palatino, regular, as it happens), then select "Apply formatting to: Header row") and specify to apply Arial to that, check the "Add to template" box, and click OK... ....then go back to the document and add a table with my new style, these font formats are not used in the cells! I found I was getting bold Palatino everywhere - the "reveal formatting" task pane is hard to interpret, but seems to be saying that this font fomatting is just taken from the "Normal" paragraph style (but my Normal style doesn't specify bold Palatino!?) If I go back into the "Modify Style" dialogue to re-edit my table style, the setting I specified *are* still there I have a similar problem if I try to specify borders in this dialogue for a heading row and for the whole table - my choices are remembered in the dialogue but simply aren't implemented if I create an instance of the table in the document. I'm bewildered - this is stuff I could do in 5 minutes flat in Adobe FrameMaker :-/ |
#2
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(sorry, should've mentioned, I am using MS Word 2003 service pack 2, on WinXP SP2) |
#3
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Font settings don't work properly in Table Styles - they will only have any
effect on text that is in Normal style and also in the default Word font. The best solution is to use paragraph styles for the text in tables. Borders and shading do work, but I have found that trying to set up the specifics for the last and first rows and columns can be impossible to achieve without ruining the settings for the table as a whole (which affects how borders behave across page breaks). There may be some order of work tricks, but it certainly isn't intuitive. You do of course need to check the right boxes in the Autoformat dialog to activate the special heading formatting. All in all, it generally seems to be easier to use one of the pre-Word 2002 tricks for formatting tables - either set up some preformed tables as AutoText, or use macros to apply the formatting you want. Definitely one of the areas where Framemaker has the edge! (You will be dismayed by cross references, too.) -- Margaret Aldis - Microsoft Word MVP Syntagma partnership site: http://www.syntagma.co.uk Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.word.mvps.org "feline1" wrote in message ... From the 'Styles and Formatting' task pane, I have set up a new 'Table Style'. However the options available in the "Modify Style" dialogue simply do not seem to work: for instance, if I select "Apply formatting to: Whole table", and specify a font to apply throughout (Palatino, regular, as it happens), then select "Apply formatting to: Header row") and specify to apply Arial to that, check the "Add to template" box, and click OK... ...then go back to the document and add a table with my new style, these font formats are not used in the cells! I found I was getting bold Palatino everywhere - the "reveal formatting" task pane is hard to interpret, but seems to be saying that this font fomatting is just taken from the "Normal" paragraph style (but my Normal style doesn't specify bold Palatino!?) If I go back into the "Modify Style" dialogue to re-edit my table style, the setting I specified *are* still there I have a similar problem if I try to specify borders in this dialogue for a heading row and for the whole table - my choices are remembered in the dialogue but simply aren't implemented if I create an instance of the table in the document. I'm bewildered - this is stuff I could do in 5 minutes flat in Adobe FrameMaker :-/ |
#4
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"Margaret Aldis" wrote:
Font settings don't work properly in Table Styles - they will only have any effect on text that is in Normal style and also in the default Word font. I'd say it another way: As long as the "Normal" paragraph style is in "Times New Roman", it should work fine. The best solution is to use paragraph styles for the text in tables. Or refrain from customizing the "Normal" paragraph style, except maybe change it to 10 pt font size, since else you can't change the table style to 10 pt. If possible, I'd like to avoid applying paragraph styles on top of table styles... just seems a bit messy. For example, it gets hard to see which table style is applied. ;-) Klaus |
#5
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Hi Klaus
You've obviously been more successful with Table Styles than I have :-) Sorry if my posting was over-prescriptive and negative. I really, really tried not to be a Luddite over Table Styles when they arrived in Word 2002, but in all implementations where I've used them the font and paragraph formatting in the Table Style seem to have been more trouble than help and I've had to resort to table formatting macros anyway. However, fair to say this is fairly complex tech doc formats where tables can contain different paragraph types, and with the need to support a lot of "cut and paste" usage. -- Margaret Aldis - Microsoft Word MVP Syntagma partnership site: http://www.syntagma.co.uk Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.word.mvps.org "Klaus Linke" wrote in message ... "Margaret Aldis" wrote: Font settings don't work properly in Table Styles - they will only have any effect on text that is in Normal style and also in the default Word font. I'd say it another way: As long as the "Normal" paragraph style is in "Times New Roman", it should work fine. The best solution is to use paragraph styles for the text in tables. Or refrain from customizing the "Normal" paragraph style, except maybe change it to 10 pt font size, since else you can't change the table style to 10 pt. If possible, I'd like to avoid applying paragraph styles on top of table styles... just seems a bit messy. For example, it gets hard to see which table style is applied. ;-) Klaus |
#6
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Hi Margaret,
You've obviously been more successful with Table Styles than I have :-) Not really, no :-( Like you, many times, the kinds of tables I use are too complicated for table styles anyway. Say, tables in grammar books. You'd really need cell, row, and column styles for these. Most times, it's easier to do the formatting with macros (and for some things that are outside the scope of table styles, such as consistent column widths, you'd need them anyway). So often, I tried to do most of the formatting with table styles, and the rest with macros. Then, I've had two ugly cases were all tables in a certain table style went blooey ("corrupted") all of a sudden. And since I didn't notice it immediately, I had the choice to go back to an old backup, or redo/reformat all those tables. In more simple cases, they worked quite well, though. Since you can't avoid them anyway (each table has a table style), I still try to make them useful. If you can live with an uncustomized (except for 10pt) Normal paragraph style, it may be worth checking them out... if you don't mind living dangerously s. Regards, Klaus Sorry if my posting was over-prescriptive and negative. I really, really tried not to be a Luddite over Table Styles when they arrived in Word 2002, but in all implementations where I've used them the font and paragraph formatting in the Table Style seem to have been more trouble than help and I've had to resort to table formatting macros anyway. However, fair to say this is fairly complex tech doc formats where tables can contain different paragraph types, and with the need to support a lot of "cut and paste" usage. |
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