Hi Danny:
That's a real PITA but it is an unavoidable consequence of the way Word
tables are constructed! I blame WordPerfect for this...
Way back before most of us were born, WordPerfect was the dominant
word-processor. It constructed "tables" using paragraphs and tabs and
special ASCII "line" characters such as | to draw the lines. When they
designed Word, they designed it around a similar mechanism to preserve
compatibility. Now we're stuck with a mechanism that is compatible with a
product that virtually no longer exists, in the same way as Excel gets its
dates wrong in a manner exactly compatible with VisiCalc
In Microsoft Word, a "Table" is a "Collection" of "Paragraphs". It's a
nested structure, in which the table is a paragraph that contains paragraphs
(which can contain tables which contain paragraphs, and so on down to nine
levels of nesting...)
One of the rules that make a paragraph a paragraph in Word is the fact that
it must have both a paragraph format and a character format. Unless you
change these, they are both set to "Normal" style (which internally is
"Style 0" from which every other style in the document inherits its
properties (unless you change that too)). As you have now discovered, this
results in a very complex structure that is difficult to control.
But not impossible.
An easy way around it is to take advantage of the fact that every table cell
in the document starts out formatted with the Normal style. Set your Normal
style to the Font and Paragraph formats you want for your table cells and
every table cell will have the formatting you want!
That means you need to use a different style for your document text. May I
suggest "Body Text". It is a built-in style that is designed for the
purpose. It starts out by inheriting all of the properties of normal style,
you only need to change the ones you want. If you use Body Text for all of
your text paragraphs, you are then free to assign any properties you like to
Normal style. Just be aware that every style in the document inherits from
Normal style, so you need to break those links before you change Normal
otherwise all of the text in the document changes.
The other alternative, is to select the entire Cell and apply your
formatting. I don't use this technique, because unless you have text in
there it's very hard to see what is what (as you have discovered). However,
in each table cell there is a text paragraph and an end-of-cell delimiter
(which is a special kind of paragraph). They both have formatting. By
selecting within the cell, you cannot select the outer "end of cell
delimiter", so you can't apply formatting to it. But if you select the
whole cell, you can apply formatting to both.
Sorry it's so complex: Blame WordPerfect.
Cheers
