#1
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How Word table styles disappear from a document
I work in proposals, often with teams of quite a few writers. Work is carried out through a network with simultaneous writing, usually in a document based on a custom template I created. Writers often cut and paste tables from other Word documents with their own table and text styles.
My template includes three custom table styles, which are available to be either copied or, for those using their QAT, inserted or the table style applied. Sometimes, a given pasted-in table knocks out my custom tables. That is, when my cursor is in it and I go to apply one of our styles, I find that either our table styles no longer appear in my QAT table styles display dropdown, or they are there -- hovering over the table "thumbnail" reveals the name -- but appear stripped of their formatting (e.g., filled header row), disallowing their application. Placing my cursor in another table may bring back the styles. I have found that all attempts at clearing a problem table's formatting -- Cltrl+Alt+U, clearing para and character formats, using Clear All in the styles pane -- fail. Only cutting the table to a new doc and stripping it -- sometimes even converting it to text and then back to table again (not practical with a large table with merge columns or rows) works. Any ideas about other techniques that might be a bit more convenient? A macro, perhaps? I do have one that someone here provided, but it copies all tables in the document and pastes them into a new doc as Table Grid. Thanks. |
#2
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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 Code:
Dim aTable as Table For each aTable in Selection.Tables With aTable .Style = "Table Grid" 'the table style .Rows.LeftIndent = .Style.Table.LeftIndent 'enforce the table indent of the table style .ApplyStyleHeadingRows = True .ApplyStyleFirstColumn = False .ApplyStyleRowBands = False .Range.Style = "Table Text" 'the paragraph style for text in the table End With Next aTable
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Andrew Lockton Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia |
#3
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How Word table style disappear
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. |
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Table styes
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Table styes
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#6
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Many of the problems when using table styles relate to a lack of understanding of the hierarchy of styles and, since Word 2007, incorrectly setup documents.
MS made a crucial change for Word 2007 that implemented a tab in the Manage Styles dialog named "Set Defaults". By default, in a virgin template, the Normal style will match the settings in this tab. Unfortunately, many long-term users of Word were unaware of this change and continued their old habits of just modifying Normal. Newer users are mostly unaware of the existence of the defaults tab and remain blissfully ignorant of its importance. If your table styles include text formatting it is critical that the table is inserted in a paragraph formatted with the document defaults. This means that there must be at least one style in your document/template that matches the document defaults, otherwise there is no possibility of the table style working correctly. The Microsoft Word team explained this in two blog posts in 2008, little read at the time and now deleted, though, thanks to the Wayback Machine, they can still be found. The two articles are: BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES’ ORDER OF OPERATIONS and BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STYLES, DOC DEFAULTS, STYLE SETS, AND THEMES |
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