Linking tables, F9 – looses format (Win2000, O2K SP-2)

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I have an XL-table to which a grey background (fill 10%) is applied through styles. (Don’t want to format in Excel as normal styles vary to much)
After a bit of formatting in Word, the tables look fine and I just want to update its values.
When I press F9 all formatting is lost and the table returns to some odd white looking cells, with horisontal and vertical lines scattered randomly across the table. The lines are not part of the table in Excel, neither in W ord – so where do they come from and why is my formatting completely ruined.

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When you update a field, you are bringing in data from the source and all manual formatting is lost. To format a field, you need to:
1. Select it & press Shift+F9 to see the codes.
2. At the end, put in a formatting switch, such as * CHARFORMAT or * MERGEFORMAT.

Try formatting your table the way you want, switch to see the codes, put in the * mergeformat switch, & then update your field.

Hope this helps.

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Phil, thanks.

My main concern really relates to the way MS has converted from Word tables in O97 to HTML tables in O2000. A nice thought in itself and now HTML tables are default for the paste method.

But, cellborder and cellpadding seems to cause problems in Word. I had hoped being able to avoid these problems with one of the switch arguments h, r, t, but this seems not to be possible.

After the “update event” (F9), you will note, if you make an “undo”, that a new event called “Automatic change” occurs just prior to the “Update fields” – it seems that this new event causes all the fuzz. So far I haven’t been able to locate any documentation as to what this new event does, so I’m still left in the dark.

I am currently trying various ways of solving this and there seems to be an opening for a work around, if a specific sequence is followed. (When “.pastespecial” is applied and combined with a “space” in the first table cell, the error is prevented for some reason…)

I’m still at the “research”-level on this, so it may evolve further, but so far it’s been a real hazzle.

Thanks for taking the tme
8-)))) Henrik

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