Help with proper control over table formatting

[Pyrus_Chanticleer]

I’m struggling to fully grasp how to use tables in Writer and AutoFormat Styles specifically.

As an example, I want to create a table that looks like this:

But, when entering new rows I want it to continue the cell shading format, rather than just creating further blank white background rows (I’m new, so I can only imbed one image, sorry).

I’ve seen how to do this in Calc, and I’ve been roughly playing around with creating Styles with AutoFormat, but I cannot get it to just operate how I want it to. Is Writer just stunted in this respect?

Thanks in advance.

[ajlittoz]

So-called Table Styles in Writer have a very clumsy implementation. If you accept the layout imposed upon you without any customisation, it is all right. However, if you need/want variants on the provided layout or formatting, no luck! Whenever you’ll create new elements in the table, the underlying macros while fire again and repaint the whole table to their internal definition, erasing whatever you customised.

My recommendation is to stay away of Table “Styles”. Use only style None to gain full control on persistent formatting.

Tables in Writer are intended to contain text. Every cell is equivalent to an independent subdocument. There is a rudimentary provision for simple limited spreadsheets (numeric tabular data with elementary arithmetics) in the table feature.

If you need a complex spreadsheet with sophisticated formatting, do this in Calc and insert the spreadsheet into Writer, either as an OLE object (with automatic update when you modify the spreadsheet) or as an image (static data, no automatic update).

[Pyrus_Chanticleer]

Thanks heaps for the clear reply. It had been bugging me for hours.

[mikekaganski]

FYI: this year’s GSOC project aims to introduce a dialog; but its last status report claims that its goals include “true table styles for Writer”. Let’s see