Word Paragraph Styles (font size) in Table changing halfway through document

Charles Kenyon · #1 04-17-2025, 06:28 AM

The points that Andrew makes are valid and important. Styles act a bit differently in tables.
I concur that simply applying the Table Text style, which is Arial 10 pt does NOT change the font size in a table.

I am going to move this thread to the Word|Tables forum.

Your sample is a bit anomalous in that in your initial table, the first column is 11 pts.

00 deleteme 1.png

I have my QAT display style and font information directly and that is shown in the screenshot.

I resized everything in your initial table to be Arial 10 (Direct formatting) and then selected the table and saved it as a Quick Table on my machine.
When inserted from Quick Tables, it maintained that formatting and shows the Table Text style.

P.S. I agree that 10 pt. Arial is quite legible.

Katan · #2 04-22-2025, 08:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Charles Kenyon

The points that Andrew makes are valid and important. Styles act a bit differently in tables.

Your sample is a bit anomalous in that in your initial table, the first column is 11 pts.

I had a suspicion it wasn't the proper way to apply styles to tables but doing it that way was working, so I left it at that.

Yeah, not sure why the first column is 11 pts, maybe a copy and paste error creating the test document, I did whip it up in a rush. It's possible to apply my style to the first table and have it all 10 pts, but it was impossible to do with the second table.
No idea why that was happening in the same document but Italophile seems to have pointed me in the right direction.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Italophile

Documents inherit their styles from the template at the point of creation. From that point forward the styles in the document are independent of those in the template unless changes are explicitly saved back to the template. The only exception to this is if the document is set to automatically update styles.

The template "normal.dotm" is personal to the user so nobody else will be opening your template. Share the document with anyone else though and they can certainly mess with the formatting, but only in the document.

Thanks for the clarification on the Normal template. I figured that was the case but wasn't entirely sure, so I just created a second template. Once I get it properly setup, I'll make it my Normal maybe.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Italophile

If the test document is based on the template you created then you have not set the template up correctly. The default font for the document is shown as Times New Roman.

Ah, I thought changing the Normal style was enough to set the default font. Also I didn't know there was a default table style either. I would never have discovered it was Table Grid by myself. What I thought was semi-intuitive on Word is actually somewhat convoluted

I have no idea why applying Table Text (wrongly in my case) worked for a number of documents and then decided that it wanted to mix the styles and have Arial 11. Changing the default font to Arial made the table go to Calibri 11, then changing Table Grid to my settings seems to have worked. Thanks for the help and I'll have a read of the pages you linked

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