I am using Mac Word 2011 and do a lot of formatting of documents. I use styles extensively to get the table of contents just right and to be able to make global changes to the document by modifying the styles individually. So my document will look like this in the end:

Heading 1 - Level 1
Heading 2 - Level 2
Heading 3 - Level 3
Heading 4 - Level 4
Captions (for figures and tables) - Body text
and then body text is "Normal - Level: Body text" that includes some bulleted lists, small numbered lists and some direct formatting here and there.

If I Modify "Normal" style, then all the text inside my tables change too, how do I exclude certain parts of the document from "Normal" or any other style for that matter so that when I make a change to "Normal" style, the tables dont change too.

(P.S I understand that I can add a style to tables, but that applies one formatting style to ALL the text in the table, which means I have to go back and change everything manually)

I hope my question makes sense?

Thank you!