Word 2003 offers a gallery of Table AutoFormat styles — but they may not always suit your needs. See how to build your own style to quickly make tables look exactly the way you want.

Word’s Table AutoFormat feature offers an assortment of prefab styles you can use to jazz up your tables. But those styles may not necessarily match your document design or serve your table’s purpose. Luckily, you can specify your own set of attributes and save them as a user-defined style. Then, you can just apply the style to a table whenever you want to use your custom formatting.

Note: This information is also available as a PDF download.

To demonstrate, let’s say you generate a weekly dashboard report whose data is contained in a nice-looking, easily interpreted Word table… but manually formatting the table is getting a little old. Time to build a custom style:

Figure A

1. Enter a name for the style (e.g., Dashboard) and choose the style you want to base your new style on (Figure B). We’re going to base our sample style on the basic Table Grid style, but you can start off with something fancier if you prefer. Or choose Table Normal, which is unformatted, if you want to start with a blank slate.

Figure B

1. Now you can use the various tools in the New Style dialog box to specify the desired formatting. Just choose the table component you want to format from the Apply To drop-down list (Figure C) and make your selections. For this example, we specified 11-point Arial for the entire table, 14-point bold formatting and a light yellow fill for the heading row, a 1.5-point blue outside border, a 1-point yellow inside border, light blue fill for odd rows and light yellow fill for even rows (Figure D). (You’ll notice that some of the formatting — such as the font — doesn’t display in the preview.)

Figure C

Figure D

1. Click the Format button to access additional options governing the appearance of table elements and table text (Figure cialis shelf life E). In this case, we selected Paragraph and specified 6 points of space above and below each paragraph. Not all options are available to include in your table style. For instance, you can’t set Preferred Width or Text Wrapping in the Table Properties dialog.

Figure E

1. If you want the style to be available to other documents based on the current template, click Add To Template. Otherwise, the style will belong to the current document only. Click OK to return to the Table AutoFormat dialog box.
2. If you’d like this table style to be the default for all new tables you create, click Default in the Table AutoFormat dialog box. Word will let you choose between setting the default for the current document or for all documents that use the current template (Figure F). Make your selection and click OK. If you don’t want to set a default, skip this step and simply close out of the Table AutoFormat dialog box.

Figure F

The payoff

To apply the style, click in a table and open the Table AutoFormat dialog box. Choose User-Defined Table Styles from the Category drop-down list box to display your custom style(s) (Figure G). Now, just select the style and click Apply.

Figure G