Table Cell Border options don't display selected option

[alanGmedia]

I'm trying to create an appointment calendar for a bit of holiday fun. I've created a table on the master page for the dates. I select the table and go into the table options tab and in the "Stroke and Fill" section try to select "inside horizontal" lines. But the selection does not show up (I assume it should be a lighter colour as in the alignment panels). When I print I still have all table lines showing which looks ugly. So I have 2 questions:

1) How can I select an option and have the chosen option show on the panel on screen? (And also take effect on the output obviously!)

2) Can I get rid of the blue guidelines on the page layout(temporarily) to see which lines will be printed - ie a true WYSIWYG view?

 

[GarryP]

If you have a table on a master page then, as far as I understand things, you can only format the table in the master page – in other words, you cannot have different formatting for the same table on different ‘normal’ pages.

To (temporarily) inhibit the display of the guides you can either toggle menu “View → Show Guides” or press the “Preview Mode” button (only available in Publisher) on the Toolbar.

If this doesn’t answer your questions then a full-screen screenshot showing us what you can see would be helpful.

[alanGmedia]

44 minutes ago, GarryP said:

If you have a table on a master page then, as far as I understand things, you can only format the table in the master page – in other words, you cannot have different formatting for the same table on different ‘normal’ pages.

To (temporarily) inhibit the display of the guides you can either toggle menu “View → Show Guides” or press the “Preview Mode” button (only available in Publisher) on the Toolbar.

If this doesn’t answer your questions then a full-screen screenshot showing us what you can see would be helpful.

Thanks for the rapid response. I am formatting on the master page. However, I have discovered that to select the border style options I need to actually select the cells of the table, it's not enough to simply select the table object. Doing that, I now see the "glow" on the selected option and can change it. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to affect the actual output though, I'm still getting all borders drawn! And when I go back into the table panel the option has reverted to "outside". In other words my choice doesn't "stick"...

The preview button works great, thanks for that, I'd never even noticed it before!

I'll try to get a set of screen grabs to illustrate what I'm seeing.

 

[GarryP]

Formatting the border on a table can be a little tricky at first but you soon get used to it after a while.

I’ve attached a short video showing the sorts of things you can do; watch the order in which I do things as it’s important – select the cells; then select the 'context' (which borders of the cell selection you want to format); then set the formatting.

[alanGmedia]

OK, I've solved it! I was completely misunderstanding how the stroke & fill panel worked.

It turns out you have to select the option you want and set its stroke colour. So in my case, I had to first explicitly set the whole table to "no colour" then set the inside horizontals to my chosen colour. That worked perfectly (once I removed some changes I'd made to the non-master pages which overruled the master!).

 

Thinking about it, this is different to what I'm used to but is, in fact, more powerful because you can set different parts of the table to use different coloured borders without having to select individual cells or columns etc.

PS. I found this out by looking at the Version 1 tutorial video on tables. There isn't a version 2 tables video yet...

PPS. I just saw Garry's video after I posted this, which confirms what I said above. Many thanks for your time and help Garry.

[GarryP]

You’re welcome; good to hear you’re sorted now.