Hello, Word VBA folk!

Please excuse me in advance for what must seem a daft question, but this is
the first time I've posted in Word VBA - I mostly do Excel and Project!

The ultimate aim of my code is to produce a checkerboard effect on any
table, so that, for example, cells on row 1 are black red, black re and on
row 2 are red black red black, and so on.

If anyone would like to help me with that, then great!

However, I was trying to produce a macro that would set all cells in the
table back to white, if my main code goofed up. Here is what I wrote:

Sub AReset()
   
   ThisTable = ActiveDocument.Tables(1)
   ColumnCount = ThisTable.Columns.Count
   RowCount = ThisTable.Rows.Count
   
   MsgBox (RowCount & " rows by " & ColumnCount & " columns")
       
   For RowCounter = 1 To RowCount
       For ColumnCounter = 1 To ColumnCount
           MsgBox ("Row " & RowCounter & ", Column " & ColumnCounter)
           'CellToColour = ActiveDocument.Tables(1).Cell(Row:=RowCounter,
Column:=ColumnCounter)
           CellToColour = ThisTable.Cell(Row:=RowCounter,
Column:=ColumnCounter)
           CellToColour.Shading.BackgroundPatternColorIndex = wdWhite
       Next ColumnCounter
   Next RowCounter
   
End Sub

I declared a variable "ThisTable" to refer to "activedocument.tables(1)"
The lines:

   ColumnCount = ThisTable.Columns.Count
   RowCount = ThisTable.Rows.Count

work fine, but when I tried:

           CellToColour = ThisTable.Cell(Row:=RowCounter,
Column:=ColumnCounter)

I got "Object doesn't support this property or method"

although, obviously, if I replaced the offending line with:

           CellToColour = ActiveDocument.Tables(1).Cell(Row:=RowCounter,
Column:=ColumnCounter)

this worked OK. It's only a small point, but it seems a bit unwieldy to have
to keep referring to a table in this longhanded way. Can anyone help?

Cheers

Pete