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How can I change the width of a table?

Stuart McMullin

As the title suggests, I have a table I'd like to shrink down with the end goal of having multiple tables side by side. How can I do this? Thanks!

Accepted answers

Geoff Mether _Togetha Group_

Hi @Stuart McMullin

I thought a video of layouts and tables - might be useful. Video Link

You could try using a combination of layouts and tables - to get them side by side.

Good luck!

All comments

Ollie Guan

Hi @Stuart McMullin ,

To resize table columns, just click and drag the column's border. To make other changes to your table, click inside it to reveal the table toolbar.

Column width modes

Responsive – choose this mode if you want the table to expand as you add content. You can drag to resize the columns. It'll also resize itself to fit the page-viewer's window size (within reason).
Fixed width – choose this mode if you want to drag column borders to set width. Columns appear at your set size, regardless of content and window size.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/tables-136463.html

Stuart McMullin

Hi Ollie,

Thanks for the response. I've seen that documentation. Simply put, I still don't see what you're talking about.

I don't have the options for responsive or fixed. Is there a place I can see this in action?

Stuart McMullin

I must have this in "fixed" as whenever I try to move the column width it doesn't move.

Stuart McMullin

Screen Shot 2020-12-17 at 7.19.41 PM.png

This appears to be the only option close to responsive vs fixed.

Ollie Guan

Hi @Stuart McMullin ,

It seems that your instance has enabled the new editor.

Convert pages to the new editor

How to revert to legacy editor

Katerina Kovriga {Stiltsoft}

Hi @Stuart McMullin ,

If you have the Table Filter and Charts for Confluence app installed for your instance, you may try the Table Transformer macro and its changing column width feature.

Here is an example with screenshots.

Geoff Mether _Togetha Group_

Hi @Stuart McMullin

I thought a video of layouts and tables - might be useful. Video Link

You could try using a combination of layouts and tables - to get them side by side.

Good luck!

Dick de Goede_ea962h

Hi @Stuart McMullin ,
In the new interface there is no way to do this from within the table anymore, you can only adjust individual column widths.
However you can use sections to achieve this:

Under Insert choose Layouts and add a section (choose the layout you want)
Just add the table to the left or right section column and change the section column width.

Gregor Heinrich_jvoehl

So I need tricky workarounds (layouts or macros) to perform a basic formatting action?

Can't we just agree this direction of Confluence "experience" is not in everyone's interest? Especially compared to a fully functional "old" editor that was left by the roadside 5+ years ago and whose (basic) functionality isn't matched until this day.

Many users in my company seem to be too far away from Atlassian's priorities and design choices. When people start using different "shadow" tools instead of Confluence, alarm bells are ringing.

Sorry for being candid.

Dave Coop

Will Atlassian please replace the Product Manager of Confluence with a competent human being and address stupid bugs, sorry "features" like this?

unknown

This seems like a massively convoluted "workaround" for a simple function used in documentation universally.

datecnl

Agreed, this is really silly

It seems a bug. The last column boundary can be selected, the correct cursor appears, but dragging it does not do anything.

datecnl

Accept you can't change the last column width.

Dave Coop

18 months, 9506 views and still we receive ignorance from Atlassian.

Josef Micka

when will Confluence Cloud get Fixed width mode for columns? there is no such thing available in editor.

Gil Goodridge

Thanks for this work around... worked perfectly for me.

Tomáš Petržilka_giz5s7

I created another question regarding changing last column width itself

see> How to change width of last table column?

the question here has mixed description (asking about multiple tables next to each other)

Jonathan Le_8sjl31

This really got to me too, because I just wanted a small table to hold a legend.

I ended up doing a 3 column layout page row and putting the table in there. Works fine, though a little clunky.

Jonathan Le_8sjl31

This is what I did too, but I didn't see this video until I posted the same answer.

David Saada

I can add here that I have the same issue, which I managed to workaround to some extent.

However, this has become moot due to the fact that zooming into the doc and back out clobbers my column resizing to the default one used by confluence. As a result, all columns went back to their previous sizes and last columns for all tables I have grew past the frame view.

This is real lame.

Peter Stewart_88hhu8

This was driving me crazy and it is not intuitive, but Distribute Columns is the way to do it, this essentially is 'fit columns to contents'

Screenshot 2022-11-29 162547.png

Josef Micka

it doesn't solve problem with long texts and tables, that needs to be longer than your current viewport. fixed width (idealy in em) is way to go, but we can't do that in cloud version.

Peter Stewart_88hhu8

Yeah I figured it might help someone though if they just had the issue where someone had accidentally dragged the last column too wide and then couldn't get it back again, this is such a pain.

Jason_0zxpml

This is so damn stupid design and they seem to be so proud of it

sqning

in https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/tables-136463.html described how to set fixed width mode as @Ollie Guan mentioned. it works for me.

Josef Micka

please don't confuse onprem and cloud installation of confluence.

fixed tables are supported and work in onpremise/datacenter edition, but cloud edition is missing this functionality since atlassian forced all users to new editor.

Markus Ganauser

Add another column at the end of the table, adjust the width of all the other columns and then delete the last column again. Strange workaround, but worked for me.

Marc_4s8v2n

This worked for me, but it's not very intuitive to be honest. Even myself with programming skills, find unreasonable having to define the layout first to then paste a table inside. And I can understand all people angry in this thread. Probably many of them not being technical. There should be some way to e.g. move from a table into a table within an X-column layout, or have some help message in the table options to tell you how to do this

Nezam Jinnah

There's an invisible "bar" beside the table you need to hover your mouse over. Then click + drag to re-size the width of the table. You should see, "resize table" appear if you mouse is in the right place.

It took me a while to find it so sharing to help anyone else having the same issue. Hope that helps someone.

Josef Micka

So they finally added this back "somewhat", it has two big issues tho'

1) table is centered, it doesn't follow paragraph alignment and there seems to be no way to change it

2) table cannot be wider that viewport, which is bad, because it limits you what you can put there, for example you put comments or url in last column, but since you can't extend table past viewport, it will instead create tall rows to fit all text

so it's here finally, but it's not, and it's better to stick to old editor with proper table support.

Stiltsoft support

And you may also take the Table Spreadsheet macro - create your tables in Excel-like sheets using all their basic features.

Hope it helps!

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