Body Text paragraph style is used when a table is split

When a table is split, an empty paragraph is inserted between the two resulting tables. The style of this paragraph is always Body Text, even though I do not use this style at all in my documents. I then have to manually change the style. Is there a setting to specify the styles of this “table split” paragraph?

(I also note that is somewhat puzzling why Body Text is used rather than Default Paragraph Style. Shouldn’t Default Paragraph Style be the default?)

tdf#47295 ⁠

No paragraph is inserted when a table is split. So, provide a sample file so that we can study the issue.

By the way, always mention OS name, LO version and save format when asking here.

Body Text is the “normal” style for narrative.
Default Paragraph Style has the specific technical role of defining the “default” attributes forwarded to all other styles. It should not be used for any text in a document. You’ll be tempted to customise it and this will have effects on all other styles.

Customising is an initial towards giving your documents a personal look. A more exhaustive approach is to collect all your used styles in a template (not only Default Paragraph Style) and base your documents on this template.

Attached is:
SplitTable1.odt, a document with a table before splitting it.
SplitTable2.odt, a document with the table split into two. It was split using Table → Split Table → No Heading → OK. Note that the table was split in two with a blank paragraph between them, and that the paragraph uses the Text Body style.
SplitTable1.odt (23.5 KB)
SplitTable2.odt (25.9 KB)

Version: 7.6.7.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: dd47e4b30cb7dab30588d6c79c651f218165e3c5
CPU threads: 20; OS: Windows 10.0 Build 22631; UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: en-US (en_US); UI: en-US
Calc: CL threaded

Apologies, I thought the split was a consequence of a table spanning several pages. In this case, the page is only spread over several physical pages without being interrupted.

The split operation you described is one of the numerous “convenience” operations provided by Writer to avoid recreating “objects”, like tables, from scratch. There is a fair amount of arbitrary choices in them. Style for the intermediate empty paragraph is one such choice.

But, Body Text is probably the most innocuous one as Body Text is intended to be the “normal” discourse style. Usually you customise Body Text instead of creating your own one. All these “convenience” behaviours rely on implicit (alas) assumptions like Body Text.

Unfortunately you can’t modify this behaviour. So, try to follow the assumptions. Shame is they are explicitly described in the documentation.

Concluding remark: congratulations for your use of styles. You have only one occurrence of direct formatting (in “Layout of charts” with Format>Bullets & Numbering). However, since it brings no number nor bullet, you could as well get rid of it. You can also improve the names of your styles: instead of describing their effect (bold, left/right, …) which locks you into this style state and prevents any consistent configuration change, hint at style usage like Body Text or Heading 1. This grants you total liberty in customising the style configuration while keeping the same usage.