Easily Copying Cell Formatting

Barry is often sent documents with manually applied shading in some of the table rows and he needs to apply the exact shading elsewhere. For other formatting he would probably use the Format Painter but, alas, it only copies the formatting of the text, not of the cell. Barry wonders about the easiest way to copy cell formatting from one place to another.

As far as I've been able to determine, there is no shortcut within Word that allows you to copy table cell formatting from one cell to another. You can, if you want, use the tried and true "repeat the last action" technique:

1. Select the cell you want to format.
2. Apply formatting to the cell.
3. Select one or more other cells.
4. Press F4.

This works because pressing F4 repeats the previous action you took in the document. Since the previous action was to apply some formatting to a cell (step 2), pressing F4 applies that same formatting to the other cells you selected in step 3.

This can get a bit tedious, though. A better way might be to create a macro to copy the formatting. Since Barry is dealing specifically with cell shading, I'll provide a macro that focuses just on that. Actually, there are two macros here:

Dim lbgc As Long

Sub SetColor()
    If Selection.Information(wdWithInTable) Then
        lbgc = Selection.Cells(1).Shading.BackgroundPatternColor
    Else
        MsgBox "Insertion point is not in a table."
    End If
End Sub

Sub ApplyColor()
    Dim c As Cell

    If Selection.Information(wdWithInTable) Then
        For Each c In Selection.Cells
            c.Shading.BackgroundPatternColor = lbgc
        Next c
    End If
End Sub

Note several things about these macros. First, you can see that a variable (lbgc) is defined outside of any of the macros. This is because the variable is used in both the SetColor and ApplyColor macros.

The SetColor macro is used to specify the background color you want to paste elsewhere. All you need to do is to place the insertion point within a table cell and then run the macro. It takes the background color and places it in the lbgc variable. If you select multiple cells before you run the macro, then it only uses the background color from the first cell in your selection.

Now you can select any other cells you want and run the ApplyColor macro. It takes the value stored in lbgc and applies it to the background in every cell you selected.

If you assign shortcut keys to these macros (or add them to your Quick Access Toolbar), then you can easily copy background shading from one cell to any number of other cells you desire.

As I said, these macros deal only with background color because that was the issue being faced by Barry. There are other table cell formatting elements that could be saved and copied using the same technique—just define the storage variables outside of the macros, save the values in the SetColor macro, and then apply the values in the ApplyColor macro.

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