Serious anomaly with table cells

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francis@jw.estec.esa.nl - 30 Sep 2006 12:04 GMT

Like many my documents accumulate excess styles when pasting text from
other people's documents. Yesterday I used the style organiser to clean
up unused styles (one's which had obvioously been imported). Afterwards
my "CellBody" style, used for table cells, has suffered anomalous
behavious.
1. it has acquired a left indent of 2.75 cm (used in several other
styles but not that one).
2. it has acquired Centre alignment (whereas it was previously left
aligned).
3. although I can change individual cells back by directly modifying
thier formatting, I cannot make such changes stick by modifying the
style.
4. worse -- if I turn on automatic update to the style the behaviour is
very strange. If I click the left align box it will not apply but
instead the left indent box changes to 2.75 cm. And all the tables in
the document become changed in this way.

I have tried this on 2 separate machines, PowerPC and Intel based. Same
behaviour.

Is there some underlying table format to drive this? I have tried
looking in the TableNormal style and TableGrid style but neither have
the centre alignment or 2.75 cm left indent.

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Elliott Roper - 30 Sep 2006 16:28 GMT

> Like many my documents accumulate excess styles when pasting text from
> other people's documents. Yesterday I used the style organiser to clean
[quoted text clipped - 19 lines]
> looking in the TableNormal style and TableGrid style but neither have
> the centre alignment or 2.75 cm left indent.

First off, turn off automatically update styles and superglue the
little blue jellybean in place. You can partially work round one of
Word's most egregious mis-features by doing so.

Second, head for format » styles, select your cellbody style and
wrassle it back into shape there. Make sure the 'apply to template'
button in the bottom left is checked as you leave. You may need to hunt
down the definitions of the style that cellbody is based on, get that
right, then make sure that Word has not re-added the indent to cellbody
as a result of doing so.
When next you quit Word, OK the box that says normal has been modified
do you want to save it?
(There may be a preference that controls whether you are asked
for that. I strongly recommend that you set it, since that is another
nail in the coffin of automatically update styles.)

Finally. Grab "Bend to Word to Your Will" from the MVPs site.
Among all the other gems in there, is an argument for "paste
unformatted" to stop styles from the documents of the unwashed masses
from perverting your own. Along the same lines, look for "global
templates" as an advanced technique for stopping your styles from
slipping underneath your feet.

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Mac Forum / Applications / Word / September 2006

Serious anomaly with table cells