Table styles are a great feature but they do have some weird implementation headaches. For instance, using Normal paragraphs inside a table is often a bad idea as the table style settings can override the paragraph style settings when Normal is the paragraph style. This is less of a problem if you use other paragraph styles in your tables.

The appearance of table style icons varies according to the optional table style settings on that table. For instance, if your table has 'Header Row' turned off, the icons for the table styles won't display the shaded first row. Turning this back on changes the table style icons. The most common of these optional settings are in the first group of the Table Tools>Design ribbon tab.



I always use a macro to format tables which applies a table style + sets the preferred table style options and sets the content in the table to standardised paragraph styles. You can apply this to as many tables as you have selected if you use a loop like this

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thank you, Andrew.

Just to note, since you mentioned it, I have had the problem of table styles overriding custom text formats (styles) as well. The one that comes to mind, and perhpas the only one, is font size. If someone has pasted in a table with a spec of, say 11-pt font, and then formatted it locally to look like my custom table, including applying the custom table text font, my attempt to clear the font format to make it 10 pt holds for about 1/4 second before reverting to 11. This had me quite perplexed the first time I saw it.

Andrew, I just got around to playing with the macro [routine?] you provided. The above paragraph is very useful indeed! I'll be sharing both with my DTP colleagues. Thanks again.

Andrew, I just got around to playing with the macro [routine?] you provided. The above paragraph is very useful indeed! I'll be sharing both with my DTP colleagues. Thanks again.