Table Autosize anomaly

[Dave Gehman]

I have a table that steadfastly refuses to autosize. Note that Column 2 is oversize -- and that Coluims 1, 5, and 6 are NOT autosizing. The table will NOT respond to manual width changes via clicking and dragging on the cell separators.


That table's Properties:


None of the Column 2 cells are locked.

I've tried changing it to Default - no difference. I've tried all forms of sizing - Autosize, Size to fit on page, Size table manually. Same behavior each time.

Short of completely re-entering a new version of this table, how can I get this one to behave as expected?

[Tim Green]

Hi Dave,

Did you import the table from Word? That is the most common cause of flaky behavior like this. When Word formatting has got stuck like this you may need to do a reset on it:

1. In the table properties, apply a different table style and confirm that you want to reset the settings of all cells.
2. Select the entire table and apply the Normal style to reset all paragraphs in it

The problem is that when Word elements involve manual formatting they will include a huge amount of formatting code. If you look in the XML editor you'll see that the code is many, many times larger than the actual text. This is so complex that it sometimes causes strange results and the simplest solution is usually to just get rid of it and start over with a clean HM XML slate.

[Dave Gehman]

Not the table, but the contents of key cells were cut-and-paste from Word -- the trailing, static cells were just c&p of words ("", Cached, Parameter, etc.) directly typed into H+M. I did try pasting entire tables from Word to Jarte (RTF word processor based on WordPad) and thence into H+M, but not in this instance.

I'll do some experiments in a new (scratch-pad) H+M topic, looking at the XML as I go. It's possible that Jarte/WordPad is failing to simplify the material originally from Word. I'll also compare the XML around the recalcitrant cells and maybe see how the formatting differs from the other cells in the table, which CAN be thinned or widened via dragging them in the H+M WYSIWYG Editor.