Cannot resize table columns in word 2013

Matt, your description of the problem is thorough and accurate.

I have been a big proponent of using Word tables over Excel worksheets when formatting tables for documents (i.e., no calculations). For years, I have gotten pretty good at making Word tables look the way I want. But this problem really confounded me.

Clearly, the development team at MS needs to fix this. This is obviously a pretty big bug.

Thanks for helping me get past this.

This is the exact issue we are currently experiencing.  

This issue occurs under the following conditions:

• Office 2016
• In page layout dialog....
  • Odd and Even pages checked.
  • Left and right margins set to different measurements from each other.
  • Multiple pages set to Normal.
• In document View set to Print view.

Table column resizing behaves correctly for tables on primary pages but not for tables on the even pages.  

Sometimes the columns cannot be adjusted at all and at other times dragging a column results in the adjacent column resizing and not the one that was dragged.

I have also noticed that the ruler does not display or behave correctly for the tables on the even pages.  It appears to skew off to one side as if it has a rather large indent/outdent added to it.

If the left and right margins are set equal to each other or the multiple pages in the page layout dialog is set to 'Mirrored Margins' then the tables work as expected.

Workarounds to allow table columns to be adjusted on the even pages include :

• adding a temporary page break to force tables onto a primary page, adjust the columns then remove the page break.
• unchecking the odd & even pages in page layout dialog, adjust the columns then recheck the odd & even setting.
• switching the  view to a different mode, such as outline or normal, adjust the columns then changing the view back.

This is far from ideal and most certainly not a fix to what  evidently appears to be a bug.  And is certainly not something we like to provide to our clients as a solution to the problem.

How can this issue get raised as a bug with microsoft???

In Word 2016, I can reproduce the steps you listed, and I have reported it to the Office team.

Thanks very much to those of you who posted about this recently and brought it to our attention. Thanks to you speaking up, our engineering team is now actively researching the issue and working on a fix for it. When I have more information, I or someone from the product team will post back to this thread to let you know.

Best,

-Erik, Office Newsroom

Thanks very much to those of you who posted about this recently and brought it to our attention. Thanks to you speaking up, our engineering team is now actively researching the issue and working on a fix for it. When I have more information, I or someone from the product team will post back to this thread to let you know.

Best,

-Erik, Office Newsroom

Hi Erik,

It's already 2017 but the problem still persist.. Is there any new info or solutions to this?

Do you need to have different left and right margins, rather than setting the margins equal and setting a Gutter margin.

If for some (strange) reason, you do want such page setup, instead of setting the margins to different values, insert a text box of the appropriate width and of a height equal to the vertical text space into both the Odd and the Even page Headers, with the text set to wrap square around the text boxes.