If anyone's looking for the Confluence Cloud documentation on tables, you can find it here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ConfCloud/Tables

And the server docs are here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Tables

They usually update the relevant documentation. If you checkout the latest documentation for "Tables" in Confluence, you'll find this bit: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/tables-136463.html#Tables-Edityourtable

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 – The table will expand as you add content, and you can drag to resize the columns. It'll also resize itself to fit the page-viewer's window size (within reason).
• Fixed width – Drag column borders to set width. Columns appear at your set size, regardless of content and window size.

Apologies in advance for the spam this comment will generate to the hundreds of issue watchers -

I'd been wanting this functionality for years and finally noticed today that this issue has been resolved. However after reading through every single comment I failed to find a link to the "official" documentation from Atlassian. Googling is not any help because typical phrases ("Confluence table width", etc) return only

• this ticket
• plugin solutions from years past
• Atlassian community posts from users asking how to achieve "no-wrap" table columns

I finally found the following blog post from May 2016 -

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/blog/2016/05/resizable-table-columns-in-confluence

That seems to be the closest thing to "official documentation".

The Confluence internal "Help" docs that ship with each version (I'm currently using "Server" version 6.1.3) also do not mention this functionality at all.

It is rather cumbersome to go hunting for this type of information, I would have preferred if Atlassian staff could have a policy of adding links to official documentation upon resolving/closing this kind of high-visibility issue that has hundreds of votes. Atlassian might even consider having an issue field like "spec" or "doc" to better facilitate linking to official docs. We do this internally at my current company.

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.

So, I see the status of this was changed from In Progress to Resolved. And the version it's fixed in is listed as 6.0.0-OD-2016.05.1. (The link of which, by the way, leads to what appears to be a completely unrelated item.)

However, I'm kind of confused. Does this mean in the on-premise 6.0 version we will be able to specify column widths? It would be great if someone from Atlassian could specify what the resolution was. Just changing the status doesn't really tell me much.

Thank you.

@Adam Jacobson - I'm referring to a different scenario than https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-37847. I'm using normal, static tables in the Page Properties macros, so I don't have any problems with the Page Properties Report generating.

What I want to do is change the width of the columns in the Page Properties Report table. It's similar to controlling column width in, say, the Content Report Table macro or Task Report macro.

@Chris Z - Not sure it'll be much use to you in that scenario until is CONF-37847 fixed. Page Properties Report macro was broken for dynamically generated tables sometime after 5.4.3... on server anyway.

So happy to have resizable table columns launched in Cloud!

Now I'm wondering how this feature will be rolled into dynamically generated tables, which still have the old problem of being unresizable.

For example, I use Page Properties Reports frequently. I need to be able to set the widths of columns in the report table.

Thanks!

Edit: This feature is coming very shortly to Cloud (not as short as I had initially thought!) and will be coming to Server in the next major release later this year.

There are real use cases for wanting to be able to control column widths on the web/with Confluence. And suggesting Word as an alternative for such basic functionality is hardly helpful or reasonable.

As it stands, I don't expect this feature to be coming anytime soon, even if someone is working on it. I would be happy to be proven wrong, though.

I'm with Dale. Other people can make excuses for Atlassian and tell us we shouldn't be feeling the way we are feeling, but this issue and countless others like it are incredibly frustrating.

Dale Baley - my suggestion to you, as someone who's been using Atlassian for several years now and is quite invested (monetarily, time and company processes), is to be sure these little quirks and missing functionalities will not have an impact on your business, or if so, that it's impact you can live with.

While this one does not have any negative implications on our personal use case, there are other issues that do (some of which have been closed with statement of never getting attention), and we have invested so much at this point that it would be near impossible for us to move to some other solution without having a major impact on our business.

Atlassian provides some really amazing solutions, and they have gotten better over the last couple of years, but there are indeed quite a few things missing and / or lacking. Before you get too far along, be sure you can live with it.

I don't mean to poke, so I do apologize for prompting that. I do think that's quite funny. I don't find flexible columns and rows that useful, so maybe this feature isn't really "wowing" me as much as it clearly is some other people. I suppose if you really need page formatting you could use Microsoft Word. For the record, this didn't become a popular issue until 2012, because of the new editor in Confluence 4. It was largely ignored prior, you can see in the history yourself.

At that point, due to Atlassian's effort to keep issues an open place for discussion, many people found this issue and began commenting and voting on it. I'll be happy to have it when we do, but I don't usually get great reasons out of my customers when I ask them what or why they need that sort of ability.

*Created: 13/Jun/2005 8:04 AM*

And this is but a single ticket. After days of looking at little quirks, missing features and bugs in tickets as old or ignored as this I finally left a comment. It's quite depressing.

11 years is hardly an example of good progress. I suppose it's good to see some progress, but when you pay thousands of dollars per month for a solution, it's not easy to swallow a lack of basic functionality and 11 years of no solution for a highly voted on feature request.

sysadmin152, this is in progress and marked with a fix version. I'm confused as to why you'd choose this issue to leave that feedback on I suppose, this is an example of good progress and communication from Atlassian – They have compiled various suggestions into one, asked for personal feedback on Atlassian Answers, and now are implementing this new feature.

Wow. This request is from 2005. So many seemingly trivial ticket requests/bugs over years and they don't get either implemented or get real feedback. As a fairly new customer just starting to actually use this software it's giving us more and more a reason to not use it for almost every ticket we view.

It's in progress! Usually a good sign.

When will this happen? There are a lot of things in the Atlassian backlog repeatedly requested and upvoted by users that don't seem to be gaining much traction. Why not?

Another mistake from Atlassian????

When will be this issue really in production?

This issue is mentioned in commits included in the Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2016.01.1-0003 release being approved for production: CPU-180

This issue is mentioned in commits included in the Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2016.01.1-0002 release being approved for production: CPU-179

Humble apologies to everyone for the spam from my minion, which was itself getting spammed with duplicate messages about the Confluence release.

It now only posts comments the first time it hears about a release, and visibility will be restricted to atlassian-staff. We use these notifications to let our developers know when our continuous delivery process has promoted a release containing their changes to the next stage.

– Atlassian Cloud Release Manager

What happened? Poor little guy... reminds me of the robots in Dark Tower series. The world has moved on little Minion Bot.

jkleynhans ohernandez@atlassian.com

Please help,the spam is getting bad.

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

For the love of god could you stop auto-commenting on this? Can someone from Atlassian fix this bot? It's out of control and my phone won't stop buzzing.

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

This issue is mentioned in release Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 just promoted to jirastudio-prd-virtual

FYI: Your Minion Bot forgot to set the comment visibility and probably spammed a lot of watchers.

This issue is mentioned in commits included in the Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 release being approved for production: CPU-141

This issue is mentioned in commits included in the Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 release being approved for production: CPU-141

This issue is mentioned in commits included in the Confluence 6.0.0-OD-2015.50.1-0003 release being approved for production: CPU-141

Thanks Mick. Will try that anon.

@Stanislav and @ Andrew - this is true, but you can add the code in manually and it should work.
See https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/12263440/how-to-fix-the-column-width-in-tables for more info.

Sadly that add-in only applies to Confluence Server, not Cloud.................

I have found a solution - https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.editor.confluence-source-editor
This free plugin allows to edit Confluence page as HTML. I've just set column width like this

<th width="33%">Column Name</th>

and my problem was solved.

this feature will help a lot to non html experienced team. Would like to see some progress in this issue.

Hi, this would be useful functionality for us and it is very nice to see this feature progressing.

Best regards,
Tommi Laukkanen

Hi folks, we've started working on this improvement! So far we've made some great progress, but of course Confluence tables are being used in a myriad different ways and we want to make sure we get this right (i.e. add functionality without breaking anything for anyone).

If you've been watching this ticket, I'd greatly appreciate it if you can help us answer the following question: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/28869605/which-default-table-behaviour-do-you-expect-fixed-width-or-automatic-width

Regards,
Henk Kleynhans | Senior PM - Confluence

Being unable to change table width prevents our migration from Help&Manual to Confluence.

Come on, 2015 and I still can't set width of a table??!!!

What's up, I can't tell my users to use html or any other code, the default width with many columns is too narrow.

How do I vote for this essential function? 10 years on.............?? Come on, Atlassian!

AD

147 people watching ... I wonder if the first watcher is still getting the emails 10 years later.

I wonder if this is the only ticket of such an age in this tracker

It's official - this feature request is one DECADE old. That must be some kind of record.

This is a critical usability feature.

This is an issue we are facing at my company while using Confluence to document User Stories in an Agile fashion. Developers are having a hard time viewing acceptance criteria, because the story itself contains the longest sentence. An update would be most appreciated.

itoperations7 please be patient!
In a week we will celebrate 10 years of this issue!

Bump ... Any chance you guys are going to do this???

No worries Kevin. I don't see an equivalent issue in the JIRA project so you could submit a new "Suggestion." Might do well to reference this issue as well.

Well now I feel silly, my apologies. I've been going down a rabbit hole trying to find some sort of solution to the issue in JIRA and found my way here through an external link.

EDIT: I don't believe I have permission to remove the attachment, but since it's not relevant if someone else could delete it for for me I'd appreciate it.

Not sure if it makes a difference to you Kevin Jett, but this issue is pertaining to Confluence, not JIRA.

Currently still getting acquainted with JIRA, and while I like a lot, the wrapping behavior is ridiculous. I can't believe how old this issue is either.

I've been struggling for a few hours with this, so I figured I could drop a post here for anyone who might be looking for something similar (also posted in this topic):

The following code creates a one-row table with a middle column of fixed column width, and the cell in this fixed column contains a Code Block which can expand without altering the width of the table. Additional rows should follow the same structure.

<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>Column 1</td>
      <td style="max-width: 900.0px;width: 900.0px;">
        <ac:structured-macro ac:name="code">
          <ac:parameter ac:name="linenumbers">true</ac:parameter>
          <ac:parameter ac:name="collapse">true</ac:parameter>
          <ac:plain-text-body><![CDATA[<codesnippet 1>
<codesnippet 2>]]></ac:plain-text-body>
        </ac:structured-macro>
      </td>
      <td>Column 3</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
<table>

Hope this can help prevent someone from pulling their hair out in the future

Well, we abandon CSS3 !

In the PDF stylesheet, I add this code :

table  
{  
   table-layout: auto !important;  
   width: auto !important;  
} 

In my page, I include a table (4 columns for example) and a CSS style sheet.

Code :

/*1st column*/
td{width: 50px;}
 
/*2nd column*/
td+td{color: red;}
td+td{width: 100px;}
 
/*3th column*/
td+td+td{color: green;}
td+td+td{width: 75px;}
 
/*4th column*/
td+td+td+td{color: blue;}
td+td+td+td{width: 150px;}

In Confluence : ok.

Export PDF : ok.

If it helps.

@Charles

I am not a computer expert.

I'm just trying to learn.

Maybe pdf export problem is right on our deployment of Confluence. It would do more tests.

As I understand, Confluence supports CSS3. While normally the pdf export should be supported with media queries.

But I'm not sure to do this correctly.

Dominique's suggestion looked really promising, but then there's the caveat that it doesn't work in space Export PDFs. Everything renders correctly in the intermediate html used for building the export, but unfortunately doesn't survive the html -> pdf process.

It appears that Confluence Cloud includes a macro known as CSS Stylesheet ({style}). See CONF-31103.

It's included in Adaptavists Content Formatting macro pack but server installations have the option of using Space stylesheets and the HTML macro instead additionally.

Look in the editor menu "Insert -> Other macros".

Or type directly in the section :

{CSS ...

This is not really part of the solution, but the Confluence general use.

where do i get the macro "CSS Stylesheet"