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Table Styling and Paragraph Formatting

Anonymous
2020-11-06T20:58:58+00:00

I've been working on creating a template in Word. One thing I want to do is create a default style for tables. Now here's the thing. I've figured out how to mark a table style as default and how to edit that style. However, if I edit the Paragraph format for the Table Style, I get inconsistent results. If I set Before and After to auto, it resets to 0 like I want. If I set to single spacing, the spacing defaults to what is defined in Table Normal. It also doesn't matter what I set the Font or Font Size to.

I've learned through reading through various posts that this is apparently the intended behavior. What doesn't make a lick of sense is having had for at least a decade an interface that suggests you have that control? Moreover, why is it so hard to understand that one might want tables to have a consistent style, including fonts and line spacing?

Is there a way to do actually achieve this: all tables with a different font, line spacing, etc. that only requires an end user to insert a table like normal? Quick tables are not a sufficient answer because I don't want to have to define the number of rows and columns, headers, etc. Flexibility is the desire.

Cheers.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Jay Freedman 207.6K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2020-11-06T22:46:45+00:00

    We, the Microsoft Word MVPs, feel your pain. In the article https://shaunakelly.com/word/styles/custom-table-styles-2002-2003.html, written nearly 15 years ago by one of the most knowledgeable people in the Office world, Shauna explained that table styles were essentially unusable. As far as I can tell, nothing about table styles has changed in any subsequent version of Word.

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  2. Stefan Blom 339K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2020-11-07T13:27:58+00:00

    Make sure that the text formatting of the Normal style matches the corresponding settings for document defaults in your document. That usually makes text formatting in tables more predictable (because of the convoluted hierarchy of styles and formatting in Word). It probably does not fix all the issues covered in Shauna Kelly's article, though.

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  3. Charles Kenyon 166.7K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2020-11-07T04:19:50+00:00

    You might want to look into using Quick Tables. It is not a good substitute for working styles but it is an option.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-11-06T23:12:04+00:00

    I was expecting such an answer. It's such an odd behavior too as you'd think that styles would follow a similar inheritance or specificity like CSS.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-11-07T04:26:11+00:00

    As I sad in my original post:

    Quick tables are not a sufficient answer because I don't want to have to define the number of rows and columns, headers, etc. Flexibility is the desire.

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