Adjusting Column Widths on Joined Tables

You can easily join tables in Word by simply removing the paragraphs that originally separated the tables. However, this may present a problem if the tables had different numbers of columns or if the column widths in each table were different. There are many different ways you can approach this problem, most of which involve some sort of repetitious activity that can get very tiring if you have many columns in the table.

One quick solution to this problem is to allow Word to do the formatting for the columns. To do this, you follow these steps:

1. Position the insertion point anyplace in the newly joined table.
2. Display the Layout tab of the ribbon and click Select | Select Table. The entire table is now selected.
3. Take a look at the controls in the Cell Size group. Note that there are controls for both Height and Width. You are interested only in the Width control; click the up-arrow at the right side of the control. Word makes the column widths quite a bit narrow, but more importantly it makes the overall aggregate of the column widths the same. (The right border of the table is now consistent for the entire length of the table.)
4. Click the AutoFit tool in the Cell Size group. Word displays a submenu from which you should choose AutoFit Window. The overall width of the table expands to fill the available margins and the interior columns are now consistent in their widths.

At this point you can make any additional changes you want to the widths of the columns.

The problem with the methods discussed so far is that you still may not end up with the column widths you want. After all, you are leaving the widths up to Word, and that may not produce the best results for your needs. More often, you may want the joined tables to assume the column widths already set in the first table. In this case, the following method will work great. Just make sure you do these steps before you join the two tables:

1. Select all the cells in the second table that you want to join with the first table. Do not do this by selecting the entire table. The only thing you want to select is the cells, not the end-of-row markers just to the right of the last column in the table.
2. Press Ctrl+C. This copies the selected cells to the Clipboard.
3. Position the insertion point at the end of the first table. The insertion point should be right after the very last cell in the table, and just before the end-of-row marker for the last row of the table.
4. Press Enter. This inserts a new, empty row for the first table.
5. Press Ctrl+V. This pastes the contents of the Clipboard.

If you followed these steps precisely, Word will have pasted the information at the end of the table, inserting rows as necessary. In addition, the columns are the same width as the other columns in the first table. You can then delete the second table since it is no longer needed.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (9924) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, and 2013. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Adjusting Column Widths on Joined Tables.