Shading is not working on a large table. Why?

[Chuck Cusack]

I am trying to shade every other row of a table, and it won't work.
I have a table with about 31 columns, and that works fine. My new
table has about 46 columns, and when I shade a row, it doesn't do anything.
I have tried over and over again. If I select only part of the row, it will
work. If I shade the first half, and then shade the second half, ALL of the
shading disappears. Is this a big, or a limitation?

 

[Rae Drysdale]

Do you have Word 2003? Why not use the presets? Select Table, then Table |
Autoformat and table list 1. There are dozens of choices and you can modify
if you wish.

 

[Chuck Cusack]

Because I want it a specific way. In either case, there is still something
wrong with Word, and I'd like to know what.

 

[Ed Sheehan]

(I didn't get the OP feed, so I'm replying to a reply)

I have been working with table shading for several years, and from Office97
to Office2003 it has been severely buggy in this area. My tables get pretty
complex (60+ columns) and I've seen shading fail just as you describe: some
cells go back to no-fill when you shade near them. Whole sections sometimes!

My solution was to undo (ctrl-z) back to the step which produced no
failures. Then save, exit Word, and sometimes reboot the PC. Then go back
into the doc and "sneak up" on shading more cells. Then save/exit/reload and
shade more cells. It might take awhile, but I've always been able to
eventually overcome this bug.

Once I had no choice but to completely re-create the table from scratch in a
new document, and avoid splitting/merging cells as much as possible. Then
just re-enter the data by hand. I saw no failures using this approach, but i
only had to do it this way once, and if it had happened again I was planning
to switch to OpenOffice, then re-open with Word.

Good luck,

Ed