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I have just recently started using MS Office 2013. In the past, it was EASY to create a table and then highlight a column and hover over the vertical line between columns, the mouse pointer would change to the nifty little arrow line arrow pointer, and then you could drag the column and change its width. it was easy, intuitive, simple, -- a total no-brainer.
Now in Word 2013, that no longer works. I cannot drag the column widths, and I cannot change the width at all for the columns in my table.
I have looked for settings in many places, but I cannot seem to get the table to allow me to drag and resize the columns in any way.
It is very annoying that such simple intuitive functionality from past versions does not work anymore in Office 2013, Word 2013.
Stefan's answer is only a partial answer. no idea why the tables were locked, but the long urls was a side issue related issue.
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.
This worked for me (on Word 2016 for Windows). I unchecked the option for different odd/even header/footer and after that could once again resize column widths by dragging the column vertical border. Seems like a bug to me - I hope it gets fixed in a future update. Thank you for the tip, I was going mad with this problem!
I also had some text with no spaces in it, 100s of characters long, so Word 2013 automatically stretches the column width to the maximum width, and wouldn't let me shrink it at all, even after trying every suggestion in this thread (apart from the zero-length spaces, this wouldn't work as the text cannot be changed at all). Not to mention with two of these columns next to each other, the table stretches off the right side so it can't even be seen in Draft or Web Layout views.
But I fixed it! Want to know how? Luckily I still have Word 2007 installed as well, so all I had to do is open it up in Word 2007, resize it to ANY size I want, and then I can open and view it in Word 2013 fine.
Serious bug Microsoft! Shame on you for not fixing it.
That is very strange. Can you reproduce this in any document set up with "Different odd and even" headers/footers and mirror margins?
Aha! I found a solution to my problem. I have my page set up for duplex, therefore different odd and even pages and mirror margins. I found that I can adjust table columns just like always when it's on the ODD page, but as soon as I try to adjust anything on the EVEN page, they don't work no matter what I do.
My solution was to insert a page break to force to an odd page, adjust table, then remove my page break.
Does anyone else have this issue? If so, did you find a better way to solve it? I'm using Word 2016, though I have had the trouble in the past, however I hadn't connected it to duplex page setup, so I'm not certain that it was the issue while using 2010 or 2013.
I have no problems dragging table borders on my system with Office 2013. I currently don't have Office 2016 installed anywhere, so I can't test that version.