I’ve made a table in document. I’ve got an exterior border around it that is composed of thicker lines than the inside lines defining the cells of the table. It’s purely decorative. I added this border to the table by right clicking on the table, selecting table and then the borders tab and went from there.
I’ve been adding entries to the table (it’s a list of volunteers) and when I’m at the bottom row of the table and in the final cell (I started with 4 rows and 4 columns)I press “tab” on the keyboard to create a new row at the bottom beneath the one I just filled in. It’s nice and efficient.
The problem is that the row created by pressing tab has the exterior thick border lines both above and below it instead of just below as I would like it to be. I don’t want those thick lines on the inside of the table. Is there a way to change this behaviour so that the thicker lines are only on the border and not used on the inside lines? I could go back and change it all later, but that’s a hassle. Thanks in advance.
You might make use of a custom table autoformat. You will still get extraneous external borders inside the table when you add lines using the tab, but you can reformat the table easily to remove them.
First construct a blank table larger than the expected maximum size of your tables (I tried it with 20 rows x 60 columns.) Then format the table the way you want. First format the borders to Set Outer Border and All Internal Lines. Lock in the setting by clicking OK. Then in the same way Set Outer Border Without Changing Inner Lines. Now save this configuration as a custom Autoformat. With the cursor inside the table, on the main menu pick Table/Autoformat/Add, and give your format a name. You can now delete this starting table and add others of smaller size.
To format a table or reformat it after adding some lines, on the main menu choose Table/Autoformat, then select your custom format.
Hi @Subsidiarity,
I’m not aware of a way to set up the formatting for the table to make this work with your use of the TAB key at the bottom of the table.
If you don’t get a good answer from the Ask site in a week or so, please feel free to file an enhancement bug and ask for the default behavior to be changed. This is the kind of time-saving feature that would help anyone trying to add rows to the bottom of a table.
Don’t forget to mark your bug as an ‘enhancement’. The QA team will be happy to help you triage your feature request in the bugtracker.
Please post a link to any bugs you file in a comment below using the format “fdo#123456”.
Thanks!