Hello! I create a lot of templates for our company, and we're moving away from having individual paragraph styles set up for text inside of tables to simply using actual "Table Styles" in Microsoft Word. (Note: We use Office 365 Business.)

However, a user asked me if I could add a "Table Text - Right Justify" paragraph style for her to apply to specific text inside table cells that contain numbers.



I am concerned about creating a random one-off paragraph style to apply to a table that is being controlled by a Table Style. I'm kind of new to using Table Styles and want to know if doing this will cause a lot of problems. I told her I'd much prefer users select the text and use the Alignment options on the Table Design tab, but the people that will be using this template say there will be 20+ tables per document and they want it to be as quick as possible.

Can anyone give me some insight into whether this will negatively affect the template? Thanks in advance!

Charles Kenyon will likely provide some links, but here are the basics:

While you can use paragraph and character styles in a table with its own style, you need to understand how it works, or confusion and frustration will result.

the two sets of styles can cancel each other out. For example, if you apply a paragraph style that includes bold text on a cell that already has bold text from the table style, the two bolds cancel each other, and you end up with non-bolded text.

If the only exception to the table style is right-justification of numbers, the easiest solution would likely be to have the user apply the justification with the Home menu formatting controls.

I long ago took Shauna Kelly's advice and steered clear of table styles.
Why I don’t use Custom Table Styles in Microsoft Word 2002 and 2003 | ShaunaKelly.com
Perhaps I should revisit them.

My preference is to use QuickTables which do not apply to existing tables, unlike table styles.

Yes, that's a large part of my concern. A lot of the people who will be using these templates are NOT Word-savvy at all. If I could create a "character" style of sorts that only applied alignment, I'd consider it. But, to my knowledge, there's no option for that.

Thanks for the response!

For years, we've created templates with specific paragraph styles (e.g., Table Text, Table Column Heading, Table Row Heading, Table Subheading, etc.). So, the table itself would be completely cleared of formatting, and then people would apply the specific paragraph styles where needed.

However, I'm finding that using table styles is much more user-friendly for a lot of people and it makes it easier to preserve formatting. I constantly remind people to not copy/paste in things with formatting because it messes up the styles, but it's rare that people actually follow through. So, instead of me having to go through, clear everything, apply individual styles, etc., or trying to instruct someone how to do so when they're in a hurry, we can easily clear the whole table and apply the table style. Table Bullet and Table Number paragraph styles are the only ones I still keep in the Styles pane.

I'm not sure what version of Word you use, but you should definitely give them another shot! They're a bit of a pain in the butt to set up initially since you have to modify the default settings of the document to match; but, once everything is set up, they're a breeze to use!

Alignment is a paragraph-level attribute. I suppose you could create a paragraph style in which everything is blank but the alignment...?

Also, a brief training session can make a world of difference. I started a new job 6 months ago, and one of the first things I did was to create a template for some QA testing reports. I did a 1-hour session that first went over how styles worked, then how the new templates worked.

In that session, I stressed the need to use ONLY the styles in the template, and not use the formatting tools on the toolbar (I labeled that section of the menu "The Bad Place").

In your case, it might be useful to spend some time to introduce them to the table styles and how they work, and how to use the Bad Place controls to tweak as needed.

The final thing to stress is that if they really screw up the table formatting (and they will), they can just use the Clear All command in the Styles pane to reset the table back to the original table style.

Yay, a kindred spirit! I've worked as an editor at my company for almost 13 years and have written up instructions and documentation, taught learning sessions, helped a lot of people one-on-one, and simply fixed things myself when in a time crunch. There are some people that really are interested in learning how to do things on their own, and other people that just want "quick and dirty." (The latter people make my little perfectionist heart die a little inside with every document...)

This is a case where they want a template, but they also want it to be as "quick and dirty" as possible so they can quickly compare numbers and metrics throughout each report.

To my knowledge, you can't create a paragraph style with blank settings for the font, size, etc. (I just tested it, and it won't let me leave those fields blank.) If you know of a way to do this, though, I'd love to know!