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Table Styles

Table styles can contain certain elements of table, paragraph, and font formatting.

You can apply formatting such as font, borders, shading, and paragraph spacing to the heading row as well as the body rows of a table, and the formatting will automatically adjust to accommodate changes in your table structure.

While table styles aren't as flexible as you might need when creating complex documents, there are a lot of benefits to using them.

Table styles are also ever-present and might affect your work with tables when you don't choose to use table styles, so it's a good idea to be familiar with them.

You can find all existing table styles through the Table AutoFormat dialog box (Table menu). Once you apply a table style in your document, it will also appear in the Styles and Formatting task pane

Table Properties - Displays the (Table > Table Properties) dialog box with the "Table", "Row", "Column" and "Cell" tabs.

Borders and Shading - Displays the (Format > Borders and Shading) dialog box with the "Borders" and "Shading" tabs.

Stripes - Displays the Stripes dialog box.

Font - Displays the (Format > Font) dialog box with the "Font", "Character Spacing" and "Text Effects" tabs.

Paragraph - Displays the (Format > Paragraph) dialog box with the "Indents and Spacing" and "Line and Page breaks" tabs.

Tabs - Displays the (Format > Tabs) dialog box.

In the task pane, an image of a box with gridlines sits beside each table style.

Also note that the default table style, Table Grid, will appear in the Styles and Formatting task pane once a table has been inserted in your document.

If you modify the font of Normal style, then the table style reverts to the default Normal.dot Normal font (i.e., TNR 12).

This is a bug and will be corrected in Word 12.

Things to Remember