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.