bewildered by table styles

[feline1]

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 :-/

 

[feline1]

(sorry, should've mentioned, I am using MS Word 2003 service pack 2, on
WinXP SP2)

 

[Margaret Aldis]

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.)

 

[Klaus Linke]

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

 

[Margaret Aldis]

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.

 

[Klaus Linke]

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