This is a definite improvement as you can now edit column widths quickly and easily.

You can also fine tune the table and column widths in the HTML. This is worth doing as you actual table width will vary (seemingly randomly) depending on your page layout, and probably the text you enter into the table.

For example, the table width could be 85.3652% (as shown in the HTML tags). Presumably this % is the width the table is able to achieve given any page layout restrictions. You can edit that figure so that it takes up more or less space. The % you change it to is persistent, which means you can control table width.

Also, because the columns tags also have a % width, you can edit those to precisely what you want.  

Hi @gbrunning, Thank you for your quick reply. Quite easy to find actually. I was initially looking for a configuration where I could define the column width like "all columns should be x wide"

Hi stefan.siegl, If you edit a page and hover your pointer over the right border of any column you should get the resize handles. Click and drag to resize. 

So how is it done? Unfortunately there are hundreds of comments, but not an easy way to find how to actually do it now as it is fixed. I would wish that there is an update to the description pointing me to the description (or explaining it directly there)

I've taken to using non-breaking spaces for columns that I don't want to wrap. On OS X, it's fairly easy: opt-space. And you don't have to do it on every cell in the column, just the widest. Works okay if there aren't a lot spaces in the cell.

I am with Timo on this one. Actually this seems to be the only way I work with confluence tables at the moment (by editing the html source directly)...

Hi Giles,

thanks for your reply.

I think the responsive mode should still work well for your example. When you resize a column in responsive mode, the column is set as a percentage of the overall table, while the other columns still retain their normal responsive behaviour. It's not a pixel value as in the fixed width mode, but the column width will only change in proportion with the whole table (so it'll only adjust for the size of the viewer's browser window).

The problem with "so it'll only adjust for the size of the viewer's browser window" is that the column will also get smaller, which causes again line breaks within the cells, which I wanted to avoid with setting a fixed size.

I'm sure you collected a lot of feedback and done a lot of research before implementing it, so I can't say for sure what is the most common use case or what the most users expect from that feature.

That said, I can only speak from my experience and that is, the most of our tables are a bunch of smaller columns with technical data with one or more explanation (multiline plain text) columns on the right side. This is the most common table type in our Confluence instance. So I need one or all the smaller, technical columns to be fixed width without getting smaller (to prevent word wrap) even when the browser window gets smaller, and the dynamic width adjustment should only occur on those explanation columns.

It may sound silly, but my current and really trivial workaround for this is to add a single row as the last row to each table and place the string "______" inside it (of varying lengths), making the text light gray or white, which will keep those columns from shrinking.

Hi timo.rumland

Thanks for your feedback.

I think the responsive mode should still work well for your example. When you resize a column in responsive mode, the column is set as a percentage of the overall table, while the other columns still retain their normal responsive behaviour. It's not a pixel value as in the fixed width mode, but the column width will only change in proportion with the whole table (so it'll only adjust for the size of the viewer's browser window).

It's not fixing one column's width to a specific number of pixels while the rest of the table's responsive, but we're confident it'll work for the majority of use-cases.

Today, I had a look at the new feature of controlling the table column widths in our JIRA Cloud instance. While I think it has been integrated into the UI nicely, I have the impression that the implementation does not cover one really basic and simple requirement:

Setting a fixed width for one column, while the other columns stay "responsive".

For me, the most common and simple use case is to improve the readability of tables by setting one column to a fixed size, so for that column no text wrap occurs.

To my understanding, this is not possible at the moment?

luke.hart the feature has been shipped to On-Demand (cloud) instances and will be shipped to Server in the next major version (5.10.0) in a few weeks.