Formatting of Tables in modern pages

Brass Contributor

I recently noticed that when I add a table to a modern page (using the Text web part and paste from Word) the formatting of the columns doesn't automatically wrap the text any longer. The column widths just grow with the size of the text. This naturally creates a horizontal scroll bar in order to view the entire table contents (not very user friendly at all). I've added tables in the past and haven't observed this behavior before. In the past the text would wrap so that the entire table was visible. Was this change intentional? Is this a bug?

32 Replies

@Susan Hanley  Would I be able to hide the grid lines of the table like how we do on a classic wiki? 

@Mohan Kumar Narayanan Not in the out of the box. user experience.

It's 2020 and tables are still a curse to format in modern pages, anyone know if the new editing tool is on its way out??

@Susan Hanley When I insert a table, it automatically makes it 3 columns and has a fixed width that I can't seem to change. I can add columns to the right, but I can't make the table reach from the left to right edges of the webpart--it's very narrow. Am I doing something wrong?

You should be able to drag the width of the table to fill the column. It sometimes takes a little bit of tricky cursor maneuvering. Click on the column border until you see the highlight and then you should be able to drag it left or right. I just tried it and it works for me. But you do have to click on the border first.

@Susan Hanley Thank you! I did play around and discovered the same. Just in case there's an option that I can't find, is there any way to fix the vertical alignment of content in a cell? It seems to make it vertically centered by default, and I can't see any way to do that. Thanks again for your help. 

@SherriSLC Not that I'm aware of. 

The issue I have with Tables in a modern communication page is that the table itself is always left justified within the webpart.  How do I get the entire table to be center-justified?  
I have all my text centered down the page...and then there's the anchored to the left.  :unamused:

 

On a related note...a few days ago in one of my tables, I managed to get a picture embedded.  And now I can't figure out how I did it! :facepalm:

 

image in table.png

I have tried clicking the top/side/bottom borders and I cannot seem to stretch the table to fill the column. It's so annoying. It's 2021 (almost 2022!) and this is still an issue. Have you found any other way to work with formatting table width??

First time trying this (browser: 98.0.1108.62) and it's very random whether I can widen the table or not (the actual width handle appears sometimes (rarely) and mostly not at all. I can change the width of the internal column boundaries, but rarely the external one, and the adjustment lines always appear offset to the right of the actual lines. Same in chrome. Horrible user experience.

 

We really need a much better block-style editing interface.

Thanks for posting this, Murray. It is indeed a horrible user experience. I have the very same problem.

So, it's 2023. Any progress on this? (Crosses fingers, but loses hope._

@Doug Stalter 

Hey, Grant, I have not seen any change to this. About the only way I can get tables the way I want is to create them in Excel first and then copy/paste them into the SharePoint web part. Sometimes that doesn't work the way I would like either. Best thing we can do is post something to the SharePoint Feedback Community: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/forum/06735c62-321c-ec11-b6e7-0022481f8472