Excluding tables from Styles

[coachpienaar]

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!

[macropod]

You cannot exclude anything that forms a paragraph from a paragraph Style. If you want a different format for the table contents create/modify a different Style for that. Different paragraphs in a table can have different Styles.

[coachpienaar]

Thanks for that, that is what I thought. I was hoping there was a way to apply one style to the tables that doesn't change all the formatting inside the table.

ie At the moment I have a style called "Tables" - when I apply this to an existing table, then it will change all the contents, so it will remove the "bold" formatting for the headings for example. Therefore I have to create a style that's called "Table headings" and a style that's called "Table body" for instance.

Is there a way to apply a style in that manner?

[macropod]

Yes, you can have one Style for the heading row(s) and another Style for the data row(s).

You can even have different Styles for different columns and a different Style for the bottom row.

You should also check out Word's Table Styles.

[coachpienaar]

Thanks for quick reply! Yes, I forgot about Word's table styles. Will check them out again. If they are customisable, then I have won this war!