Cannot resize table columns in word 2013

Hi Doug, I had no idea what mouse mode or touch mode is, but I googled it and I don't think it has anything to do with my question / issue with tables.

I just started using office 2013 this week and I have to say, not at all impressed with this new version after having so much trouble with basic  tables functionality yesterday.

I had a table that was locked / frozen, could not be width adjusted in any way. It was ridiculous. 

I cannot recreate it now, all the new tables I have created are allowing me to resize them by dragging the column dividers. yesterday, my table was completed locked and i could not resize it at all in any way, and there was no setting that I saw that was causing this, it was just stuck.

I selected "distribute columns evenly" in desperation and then after that, everything seems to be working better. The not being able to wrap long urls in a cell is extremely frustrating as well.

I dont see any way to mark this as closed, so i guess i will pick the long url article from Stefan as a answer because it is part of the answer. no idea why the tabel was totally locked yesterday. it will remain a mystery until it happens again.

This has been driving me nuts, as well. I just stumbled on a fix. Put the document into Web Layout. Tables and Table Columns can be resized. The fixes remain when put the doc back into Page Layout mode. I have no idea why this works and I never use Web Layout, so I put it down to a fat-finger mistake that works.

Select the entire table, then right click and select 'Distribute columns evenly'.

Once this is done you should be able to re-size the columns as you wish.

I had same problem - this fix worked a treat.

Worthless to say, Office 2016 is still buggy but I found by chance a possible workaround in a different thread related to text columns  but that is good also for tables columns. I report it as is:

The only thing I found that will work is Suzanne's tip above on January 13, 2014:

"If you uncheck “Update document content while dragging” on the General tab of Word Options, it will work as expected. You lose the live layout functionality, so it’s not a very satisfactory alternative, but, until this is fixed, perhaps it will help."

I confirm that in my case it works. I can also now re-check the flag, and, after that, the problem has magically gone!

I add some more information, in the case that some good-willing Microsoft guy could be interested to fix the bug in the next decades:

• my document has many long tables generated by converting text into table on another PC using Word 2013;
• if I create a new table, it works correctly;

Hope can help.

Not sure if found an answer to this but I was having the same issue.  I turned on reveal codes (Show Paragraph Marks) and found that I had some text inside a cell that had converted to a table inside a cell.  Once I removed that I could then size the rows.  This document and table have been around since Office 2000 and was working fine in 2013 until a few weeks ago.  I found some other formatting issues that flared up in another document about that time. So I either made an unknowing change in my settings or a patch came out.