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K
ken_7703
Inspiring
December 19, 2025
Answered

Table Columns not Aligning

  • December 19, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 447 views

This is the 2nd page of a table with 1 header row. On the first page the columns align, but not here and not elsewhere in the table.

 

Is there a way to adjust column widths of only some rows?

 

Thanks

Correct answer ken_7703

The other way to handle this, which I do not recommend, is to use the menu command Table - Unmerge Cells. If you were to Unmerge the Elements and Word Style cells, you could see how they were made by splitting and joining cells. Then you could do it for the whole table, and thereafter re-merge the cells without the extra-wide Elements header cell.

 

I@davecourtemanche 's solution is going to be faster for the vast majority of messed-up tables.  If suggest that you convert the damaged table to text and rebuild it, instead of trying to fix it by slowly dismantling it to find where it went wrong. 


Well, that's more than a little embarrassing. Table Setup menu shows 20 columns instead of just 6! XD Should have thought to check that. Cells are also merged in different ways row to row, very messy, which I could see using the Table > Unmerge cells suggested above.

 

Given that there was very little formatting in the actual table, I copied and pasted the entire thing into Excel. Happily, either Indesign didn't copy or Excel didn't paste the merged cells (I suspected the later) and there was very little fiddling I had to do get things back to good after pasting things back to newly created table. I think this saved some time over trying discern the tabs that would have resulted from converting to text.

 

Thanks everyone for the suggestions!

 

All the best,

Ken

1 reply

K
ken_7703Author
Inspiring
December 19, 2025

Forgot to include the image. 😛

Capture.JPG

 

J
Community Expert
Jeffrey_SmithCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 19, 2025

Did you create the table from scratch within Indesign? This appears like some of the odd table structure you can get when placing from Word.

    K
    ken_7703Author
    Inspiring
    December 19, 2025

    The file contains the specs of a series design we've been doing for MANY years and I couldn't even guess how it originated, honestly.

     

    If there's not something I'm missing that allows one to adjust only some rows in a column, then you might be right, something wonky on import. I looked back after posting and found it's been like that since we ported the design from Ventura Publisher 🐵 to InDesign. Further on in the table columns changed size. The width of one cell was different from the cell immediately below it.

     

    I'll just try recreating it. Hopefully simply copying and pasting rows into a new table will work.

     

    Thanks for posting

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