Identical font, different appearance in table (1 Viewer)

kilroyscarnival

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Hello all!

I'm hoping someone can explain or commiserate. I'm roughing out some tables to be used for a rather busy set of data, so I made a table and added some controls to help automate it (autonumbering, some combo boxes, etc.) Because I have a lot of data to try to get onto each half-page, I went with a middle section for paragraph text with field labels inserted as small, tight text boxes.

My issue is that the text in the cells around said text boxes appears thicker than the same font, size and conditions as other cells. I used Styles, but also went back and double checked the specific font settings of each cell. I should say that when printed, the difference doesn't seem obvious. But on-screen (I've uploaded an example), you can definitely tell it looks different. The font throughout is Calibri, which the company president prefers. Table labels to the far left and in gray shading are 10, and the input areas are 11. To be clear, the font in the second column, "SW corner of", and the third column ("The local fire department...") in the snippet are the exact same font, size, and thickness according to Word.

I suspect there's something about the presence of those text boxes that is triggering the appearance of a (semi)bold text on the screen, but I also copied and pasted (unformatted) from an older document for some boilerplate example for layout. Hopefully I've uploaded the image correctly.

Thanks for any advice! Wow, I thought I kinda knew Word, but my work for the past 20+ years was mostly in Excel, Access and PowerPoint. I was the only one at my old place who knew mail merges, but now I'm primarily working with long documents with sections. I'll say that I found LinkedIn Learning's Word courses very helpful, especially one on long documents. I'm in love with building blocks, and I was a macro addict in Excel, so I'm starting to write them in Word as needed.
 

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kilroyscarnival

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Here's what I tried:

Changed whole table to a different font (TNR): the difference in thickness was still apparent.

Unbolded the text box headers (INTERVIEW INFORMATION and PUBLIC RECORDS in the image snippet): no change

Removed the text box headers entirely: then the font appeared normal.

Is there a more convenient way to add those labels without having to squander a lot of space in the table? Some of those paragraphs are going to be longer than others. And the company president doesn't like anything smaller than a 12, so an 11 might be passable while a 10 might be too small. I guess I could just have the text typed in as the first words in the cell. I kind of liked the gray drawing the eye though.
 

kilroyscarnival

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Update: gave up the idea of text boxed text, replaced with regular text and added a gray highlighter which essentially does all I'd needed for now. I'd ultimately like to protect that text, but will see where my draft goes from here.

Somehow sharing it here made me want to try to go around it... sorry for the bother!
 

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