Investment Banking Word Table Formatter

Problem: table formatting drifts across deal documents

Investment banking workbooks often arrive as .docx files where tables have inconsistent padding, indentation, fonts, header hierarchy, and total rows. Manual cell-by-cell cleanup is slow and easy to miss after copy-paste or multi-author edits.

Core capabilities

• Scans all tables in the document and changes formatting only, leaving content unchanged.
• Normalizes cell before/after paragraph spacing to 0 lines and single line spacing, clearing first-line, left, and right indents.
• Applies outer borders at 1.5 pt and inner borders at 0.5 pt, with vertical center alignment.
• Detects single-row or multi-row headers and applies center alignment + bold.
• Aligns columns by role: first column, serial-number, and year-like columns are centered; numeric/finance columns are right-aligned; other columns are left-aligned.
• Detects trailing total/subtotal rows and applies bold, while reducing false positives from remarks containing total-related words.
• Applies font rules: Chinese text uses SimSun, English/numeric text uses Times New Roman, with uniform 10.5pt size.

How it works

The script scripts/format_tables.py uses python-docx and lxml to inspect OOXML structure. Header detection uses signals such as w:vMerge, w:gridSpan, finance keywords, and adjacent-row inference. Numeric-column detection skips headers and treats a column as numeric when more than 50% of non-empty cells are numbers, currency, or percentage formats. Merged horizontal cells are mapped from logical columns to physical cells to reduce alignment errors.

Boundaries and notes

This is best for batch-normalizing existing .docx tables; it does not restructure complex merged layouts, redraw charts, or change business logic. By default the output is saved as _美化.docx, and overwrite happens only if the same output path is explicitly provided. Cross-platform use may fall back from SimSun on non-Windows systems. When editing OOXML, avoid naive append() calls and preserve child-element order.