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Autofit table columns used to be a useful feature to have. Alas, for a long time now, in both Office 2010 and Office 2013 - it simply does not work.
When using tables in an Outlook email, it still works fine, but in Word - the columns do not fit their contents.
Instead, they are a bit too narrow, causing the contents to break into two rows, with the last letter or two of the cell appearing in a second row; and the only way to fix this is to manually resize the columns.
What happened? What has changed? I'm tired of manually resizing columns that should know better.
And as if that isn't bad enough - in Word 2013 - every time you change the width of a column - it automatically changes the placement of the entire table, too.
WHAT IS GOING ON?!?
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Make sure the row "specify height", column and cell "preferred width" check boxes are un-ticked. these will always constrain your cell sizes in preference to the Auto size options.
Why are we still having to ask these questions in 2017? Microsoft are a complete joke! Their software inconsistent and requiring a bloody computer science degree just to undertake basic word processing!!! I am so angry at having to faff about looking for all the time!! Even our remote support couldn't sort it out!!!
Make sure the row "specify height", column and cell "preferred width" check boxes are un-ticked. these will always constrain your cell sizes in preference to the Auto size options.
I should add - Under Table Properties
did you ever get an answer to this question? i am having the same issue
I'm attaching a screenshot of a few tables I put together.
The first one is what it looks like after I insert a table with 4 columns (and I copied it two more times).
After I select the entire table, right-click and select "AutoFit to Contents" - nothing changes.
For the second table, I selected the entire table, right-clicked and selected "Table Properties".
Then I selected "Options" from the pop-up box, checked the "Automatically resize to fit contents" box (making sure that the "Preferred width" box was not checked for either "Column" or "Cell"), and clicked "OK".
You can see that the columns all got narrower by one click LESS than necessary, so that their contents all "spill" into the next line - but that's not all! You can also see that the left margin of the entire table moved slightly to the right.
For the third table (after going through the same steps as above) - I manually adjusted the column widths, so that the contents would each take up only one line. This caused the left margin of the entire table to move slightly to the right again (and of course, it also means that there is no more autofit, and I will have to continue to adjust the column widths manually if the contents change). This manual adjustment will also sometimes simultaneously change the width of one column when I manually adjust the width of another column, but this behavior seems to be random and I cannot find a way to duplicate it intentionally.
This was done using Word 2013. The only difference I found in this matter from the previous version is that in Word 2010, I got the second table immediately after selecting "AutoFit to Contents", I didn't have to go through "Table Properties". Also, manual adjustments of the column widths did not have side-effects, so the left margin of the entire table did not move every time I changed something. I didn't like it, but I could at least work with it. This new wrinkle has made it impossible to get my tables right, so it is unworkable.