Modifying Table Styles

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Hi. I’ll try to make this as succinct as possible. I’ve already spent an inordinate amount of time researching this, and I can’t find a straight answer (one that works!) anywhere.

I have a document (which will evetually become a template) that contains numerous tables. I’d like to leverage Table Styles to facilitate the formatting of these tables, as future users will certainly be adding tables and needing to format those as well.

I applied the style descibed in the pop-up as “Medium Shading 1 – Accent 2.” (What does one call these styles, anyway?) The style is almost exactly the way I want it, except that I want vertical borders inside the table. The problem is that there is NOTHING I can do in the “Modify Style” dialog box that will add them! I can add, remove, or modify the outside borders, but NOTHING affects inside borders.

Am I having a senior moment, or does Word somehow prevent one from manipulating vertical, interior borders? I mean, even when I apply a style WITH inside vertical borders–say, the one described as “Light List – Accent 2”–and I go into the Modify Style dialog, no options appear to recognize that there ARE borders!

This HAS to be the most unintuitive feature in Word… except maybe for List Styles.

Just give me my vertical lines in a table style! Or tell me how to create one from scratch (another task that is very poorly addressed in MS documentation.)

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In the Borders and Shading dialog shown above, just hover your mouse over the vertical border (the vertical white bar) and click the mouse. That will add the 1pt red line to the vertical border.

Terry

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Terry, thanks fo rthe reply… but the problem is that doing the action you described has no effect whatsoever on the table style… or at least, not on the particular table style I chose to customize.

Do you have that style available? Does it add the vertical lines to the style or table when you do it?

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The banding is preventing the border from showing. I’ve never noticed this before, but I usually start from table grid; I probably set banding last.

You’ll have to set the inside vertical border (using the border icon dropdown) the for each row: header, total, odd banded rows, and even banded rows.

MS must have listened to designers who will tell you that, if you have banded rows and columns, you don’t need borders. At least they just made it difficult, not impossible.

Pam

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The problem is due to the cascading nature of how a table style is constructed. In the Modify Style dialog you will notice an Apply formatting to: control. The problem is that:
Apply formatting to Entire Table is overridden by First column is overridden by Top Left Cell etc.

In the Medium Shading 1 – Accent 2 style, if you apply a border to both sides of the Odd banded columns then your table will show left and right borders on cells.

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Excellent help from you all, thank you. My final solution was a hybrid of what I learned from all of you. (Because I didn’t want banded columns, the solution that seemed to work was to simply apply the borders (and simultaneously re-apply the same shading) to Odd- and Even-Banded Rows.

I’ve had to fumble through Word’s logic (to use the term loosely) many times before; but you guys probably saved me days of stress!

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