Table styles, which are available in recent versions of Microsoft Word, allow you to define standard tables and quickly create tables with those standards in your source documents. If your version of Microsoft Word does not support table styles, use the TableStyle marker to specify the style to apply in ePublisher that defines the appearance of the table.

Table styles are often overlooked in Microsoft Word. The default template provides many default table styles, such as Table Grid and Table Normal. You can create custom table styles for your specific requirements. Define table header rows for each table that repeat when the table splits across pages, and do not allow rows to break across pages, which can create awkward breaks within tables in your printed content. You can use autotext to quickly create standard tables in your source documents.

When you define your table styles, be sure to consider the various types of tables you may need, such as with lines, without lines, checklists, and action/result tables. You can use a table without lines to layout content within an area on a page, such as a definition list with short terms. You can also create a table style for each indent position needed. For example, you can create a table style to use for tables within a bulleted list that is indented to align with the text of each bulleted list item.

ePublisher allows you to define how the header, footer, and main rows of a table appear in your generated output. To support these formatting properties, your tables must have each of these parts defined in your source documents. If a table does not have a header defined, ePublisher cannot apply the formatting defined for the header row. Microsoft Word does not support table footers, so the footer formatting settings in ePublisher do not apply to Microsoft Word source documents.

ePublisher applies the paragraph and character styles you define for content within each cell. You can also configure ePublisher to ignore character styles in a table. You may need additional paragraph styles to use in tables, such as CellBody and CellBullet, so you can define the proper margins and appearance for your generated output.