Turning “Allow spacing between cells” off with VBA in a Word 2000 table

Article contributed by Dave Rado and Cindy Meister

There seems to be no supported way in VBA to turn the “Allow spacing between cells” Table property off. You can set the Spacing property to 0 but the resulting table looks very different from how it looks if you de-select the “Allow spacing between cells” checkbox manually using the Table + Properties dialog.

Workaround 1

Selection.Tables(1).Spacing = -1 

makes the table look right.

It's a kludge, because if you then look in the dialog you'll see that “Allow spacing” is still ticked – but it's much better than no workaround at all!

Workaround 2

SendKeys "%s{Enter}"
Dialogs(1080).Show

also works. This second workaround has the advantage that it does de-select the “Allow spacing” checkbox in the dialog – but besides the inherent disadvantage in using SendKeys, the user will see the dialog momentarily appear and disappear.