Table Borders not Stored in AutoText

Christiane is running into a problem with her signature blocks. She uses a table to create the signature blocks, which allows her to easily add borders to some of the cells in the table. (The borders provide an easy way to add signature lines.) When Christiane selects the table and stores it in an AutoText entry, she can easily insert it in other documents. The problem is that when she does so, the borders on the individual cells are missing or messed up from the inserted AutoText entry.

This problem is more than likely related to how you have table styles set up in the documents you use. Let's say you set up a signature block in a document, and the table you modify is formatted using the Table Normal style. You save the table in AutoText, and then insert that AutoText entry into another document. Word remembers that you used Table Normal to define the table, so it applies the Table Normal style, as defined in the current document, to the AutoText entry you are adding.

The solution is to create your signature block using a custom table style named something like "MySigBlock." Create the style, apply it to the signature block, and then apply the individual modifications to the borders. Save it as an AutoText entry, then try to insert it into a different document. Since the custom style name won't match one already defined in the document (it doesn't have one named "MySigBlock"), there is nothing to override what you've defined in the AutoText entry.

If this still doesn't give the desired results, you could save your signature blocks (assuming you have more than one) in their own files. When you need a signature block in the current document, you can then insert the whole file, containing the signature block, into the current file. You can make this very painless by using a macro to do the insertion:

Sub InsertSig()
    Selection.InsertFile FileName:="sigblock1.doc", _
      Range:="", ConfirmConversions:=False, _
      Link:=False, Attachment:=False
End Sub