Justifying one column in a table forces the same justification on all of them.

[Opinicus]

Using Word 2002 in Office XP. All updates in place.

I have a 3 x 56 table in a Word document that is behaving very strangely.
If I select and (say) right-justify any one of the three columns, the other
two columns are also right-justified even though they're not selected. If I
try and left-justify one of the columns, all three switch to
left-justification. What could be the cause of this behavior and how can I
fix it? I want the first two columns to be left-justified and the third
right-justified but Word won't let me do it.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I have seen this and found it most frustrating. I never did have time to
troubleshoot, so I used the best available workaround: if you select just
part of the column and format it, you won't see this behavior; you can then
format the remaining cells. I suspect that it indicates that the document or
table is somehow corrupt, though it's hard to see how this can happen in a
brand-new document. I would think it was a variation on the "Automatic
update" bug (see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/WholeDocumentReformatted.htm), but I
know this was not true in my case.

 

[Opinicus]

I have seen this and found it most frustrating. I never did have time to
troubleshoot, so I used the best available workaround: if you select just
part of the column and format it, you won't see this behavior; you can
then
format the remaining cells.

That worked. Thanks.

I suspect that it indicates that the document or
table is somehow corrupt, though it's hard to see how this can happen in a
brand-new document.

It wasn't really a brand-new document. The original table was copied from a
document provided by a client and I translated (typed over) it.

Thanks for the work-around.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

My document *was* brand-new, created by me, so I couldn't think of any
logical explanation.