table styles problem (mixing with Normal)

[Alex Kachanov]

Hello.

Trying to make template for my company.

I want to create .dot file with corporative style. One of them is tables
style.
After new .dot creation I can change Table Styles, change font size in them.
But when I changed "Normal" style, all tables reset their font to this
"Normal" font.
Now changing font size for any table style doesn't have any effect...
Strange thing: when changing "Normal" to 10pt, table style become alive
and I can change their font size again.

But I don't need 10 pt in Normal.

How this should be corrected?

Thanks.

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Alex,

Weird, isn't it?
Microsoft says it's by design, others (me included) think it's a bug.

By design, Normal paragraph style is applied, but it's the only style that
is "transparent" in tables, so the font, size ... are taken from the table
style, rather from the paragraph style.
But if any property of the Normal style is customized, the transparency is
broken for that property.
According MS by design, since if a user defines some font in Normal, he
likely wants it applied inside tables, too (according to them), and the same
with any other property.

There isn't much you can do to correct it, except refrain from modifying
your Normal paragraph style (except maybe to set it to 10 pt, which bug is
probably the result of the font size of Normal in old versions of Word being
hard-coded into the table formatting routines).
And then set another style as the base "plain text" style.

But that's a very difficult decision to make, since most, by far, existing
documents *do* use Normal as the default text style, and you run into
problems when you paste stuff from them into your documents.

I can't do without modifying Normal, and have pretty much given up on table
styles -- at least by themselves.
I often use macros to format tables. Others apply paragraph styles on top of
the table style, and/or use AutoText to insert preformatted tables.

Regards,
Klaus