Linked excel table loses borders on update

[Gary McGill]

Hi,

I have a Word doc with an embedded (linked) Excel worksheet. There's no
formatting on the Excel worksheet, and I apply formatting in Word. When I
update the field, my formatting (as applied in Word) is preserved, which is
good.

However, if I put borders on the table (in Word), then these are lost when
the field is updated. (Apparently the borders in Excel override the borders
in Word, and since there are no borders in my Excel spreadsheet, I end up
with no borders in my Word table). This is most definitely not good!

I know that this was an issue with older versions of Word (see
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;153210), but I'm
using Office 2003. Is this still an issue with 2003?

The KB article above suggests setting the borders in the source document,
but given that I'm applying all the other styles in Word, it would be pretty
awful if I had to maintain the table borders in Excel...

Are there any workarounds? Is there something I can do with the field code
or suchlike to prevent this behaviour?

Thanks in advance,
Gary McGill

 

[macropod]

Hi Gary,

If the border is just around the table, you could try putting the whole
table inside a text box. Then apply the appropriate border to the text box.
Otherwise, why not format the cells as required in Excel? Taking this latter
option one step further, you could embed an Excel Worksheet into your Word
document and set it up with Excel external references pointing to the source
workbook, worksheet and cells you want to reference. Then, simply format the
embedded Excel worksheet as required. That avoids having to apply the
formatting to the source workbook.

Cheers

 

[Gary McGill]

Thanks for your reply. My objection to applying the border styles in Excel
was that all the other formatting (fonts, colours, shading, etc.) is applied
in Word, and so it's ugly to have to switch to Excel just to set the
borders. However, I've now re-done my document with the table formatting
entirely in Excel which is at least more consistent - if not any more
convenient.