Behind the Curtains: Table Styles
http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2008/11/24/behind-the-curtains-table-styles.aspx

Microsoft
2008

Abstract:

Table Styles are my favorite type of Style in Word. They allow you to quickly and consistently format the table itself (e.g. borders, shading, etc.), the content within the table (E.g. line spacing, font color, font size, etc.), and they can also can tell a table when to do these (e.g. shade every other row, bold text in the first column, etc.). The first two enable you to create really rich tables, and the last one (which I'll call Conditional Formatting for the rest of this post) enables you to easily work with those rich tables. Both are quite important.