Using Clear formatting on a table applies Heading 3

[Aelfgifu]

I'm at my wits end with tables in Word 2003. I tried formatting my own table
styles but gave up. Now I use Table Normal plus paragraph styles called Table
Heading, Table Body and Table Body Small. The problem is that stray
formatting just suddenly appears out of nowhere. To fix it I run macros that
clear all formatting but that just makes it worse. WHY on EARTH would a cell
suddenly become tagged with Heading 3?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Have you made sure to disable "Define styles based on my formatting" and
"Automatic headings"?

 

[Aelfgifu]

Yes, thank you for that advice. I found your MVP website article on that
topic after I posted this one. I'm not sure (yet) if it entirely fixed the
problem, but Word behaved much better after switching all that stuff off.

Do you think having this switched on would cause things like tables
mysteriously assuming the style of the previous paragraph? I had a style
called Subtitle (defined as dark blue, small caps, centred) immediately above
two tables in a document. Closed the document and reopened it and ALL text in
ALL tables in the doc had become dark blue, small caps and centred, even the
ones that were nowhere near a Subtitle paragraph.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

When you first create a table, the text in the table is in the style active
at the insertion point, so if the table was created in a Subtitle paragraph,
all the text in the table would be in Subtitle style. If you had not
actually changed the paragraph style but had just changed the formatting (or
applied a table style), then I could see that the text might revert to this
style. But I don't see how the proximity of the Subtitle paragraph would
affect the table if the paragraphs in the table were formatted with a
different style (unless it was based on Subtitle).

 

[Aelfgifu]

Thanks, Suzanne. You're probably right that the table may have been sitting
on a Subtitle paragraph when it was created. (I hadn't thought of that & will
be more careful in future!)

However, I think I may have discovered the real reason (... just had a
Eureka! moment ... )

It's all to do with lingering a 'Table Grid' Table Style that was applied in
the document beforehand. I dabbled with so-called Table Styles until my hair
went grey, then switched to macros for formatting tables. Now, when I create
a new table it's always based on the Table Style 'Table Normal' which is the
closest I can get to creating an absolutely unformatted table, and then the
macro adds borders, shading & regular paragraph Styles called Table Heading,
Table Body etc.

The mad reformatting into Blue + Small Caps happens SOMETIMES when the Table
Style 'Table Grid' is deleted (but only sometimes ... perhaps, as you
suggest, when the table was inadvertently built on a Subtitle paragraph), and
the cure is to apply Table Autoformat > Table Normal, then run the formatting
macro again.

Note: Mad reformatting also happens on Table Grid tables if you copy styles
from the new template into old documents using the Organizer.

Are we having fun yet?