The system comes with a style called “Table Contents”. I created two new styles based on this style called “Table Contents - Dark” and “Table Contents - Light”. In the new styles; I assign background colors; but these are interpreted as background for the text not the cell. On the “Background” tab; the “For” dropdown list contains only “Paragraph” and “Character”. How do I change the background color of a cell inside a style?
Currently, tables are not reliably managed with styles. Here is the manual way to accomplish filling the entire cell or table background with a color:
Create a table in Writer. Right-click somewhere in the table, choose Table from the list and then choose the Background tab. Select the color as you want to use and click Ok.
On the problem:
I was able to go to Table > Insert > Table. Choose the settings for the table then click the AutoFormat button on the bottom right and choose one of the auto-formats listed. This correctly applied the style to the table. Then I was able to use the Table Contents style to change the entire background of the table using Paragraph in the For option. I was also able to change some of the borders of the table, but not all. Another issue is that, if you insert another table into the same document and change the Table Contents style to another color, it only changes the text background, not the background of the entire cell. This probably needs some work by the developers.