when shading a table one cell has a white streak at the bottom

[editor]

I have windows xp withword 2003. I have tried every suggestion from the help
menue, however, I cannot get rid of the white streak at the bottom of one
cell after colour shading the whole table - I have coloured blocks of rows
with different colours. It was fine until I split this cell.

 

[Lene Fredborg]

Things you can check:
A. The "Apply to" field in Format > Borders and Shading > Shading tab must
be set to "Cell" in order for the shading to always fill out the selected
cell(s).

Could it be that "Apply to" has been set to e.g. "Paragraph" in the cell(s)
with white space? This will result in white space above and/or below the text
if you have applied space above and/or below the text in Format > Paragraph.
In addition, if you have applied cell margins (Table > Table Properties >
Table tab > Options), you will see white space along the sides with margins.

If A. is not the problem:
B. Do you have different bottom cell margins applied to the cells in the row
with the problem? This seems to result in white space at the bottom of cells
even it you apply the shading to the cells. For example, if one cell in a row
has 1mm bottom cell margin whereas the other cells have no bottom cell
margin, those cells will have 1mm white space at the bottom (i.e. only the
cell(s) with the largest bottom margin will be totally filled - other cells
will have a white space corresponding to the difference between the bottom
cell margins). For some reason, the same does not seem to apply if you have
different top cell margins (at least I did not see any white space in the top
of cells when testing in Word 2002 and 2003).

--
Regards
Lene Fredborg
DocTools - Denmark
www.thedoctools.com
Document automation - add-ins, macros and templates for Microsoft Word

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Another thing that can make a difference IIRC is having Space Before/After
applied to some, but not all, of the paragraphs in the row.

 

[editor]

Hi Lene,
Thank you. The suggestion to check the cell margins did the trick.

 

[Lene Fredborg]

As far as I remember, I also tried applying different Space Before/After
previously in order to find out whether this could trigger white space. I
just tried it again and for me the cells were fully shaded regardless of
whether I applied the shading to the cells or to the paragraphs. However, my
test does not guarantee anything - there may be combinations where the result
would be white space anyway.

--
Regards
Lene Fredborg
DocTools - Denmark
www.thedoctools.com
Document automation - add-ins, macros and templates for Microsoft Word

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

And it may be that the white space is not what I'm remembering as being the
problem. I just recall that there was *some* mysterious situation to which
the solution turned out to be extra space somewhere.

 

[Naomi1011]

We have the same problem and NOTHING seems to fix it. Is it possible the
tables are just corrupt? The documents are very long and very table heavy.
Tried the cell margins, tried space before and after, tried making sure that
we were actually filling the cells. The only "solution" that we've found is
recreating the tables, and there are probably 100 that will have to done, so
if anyone has ANY more suggestions before we undertake that, it would be much
appreciated.

Naomi

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

Is the same font/font size used for all of the text in all of the cells in
the rows in which this issue occurs?

--
Hope this helps,

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

Please reply only to the newsgroups unless you wish to obtain my services on
a paid professional basis.

 

[Lene Fredborg]

Some time after posting the previous replies in this thread, I created an
article in which I have tried to cover every single item I could find that
could cause problems with the table cell shading. Maybe you will find more
things to check in the article:
http://thedoctools.com/index.php?show=wt_cell_shading

--
Regards
Lene Fredborg - Microsoft MVP (Word)
DocTools - Denmark
www.thedoctools.com
Document automation - add-ins, macros and templates for Microsoft Word