Expanding Width of All Tables

Summary: If you have a lot of tables in your documents, you might want to change the width of all of them. You can take forever doing it manually, or you can apply the simple macro in this tip to make quick work of the task. (This tip works with Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, Word 2003, and Word 2007.)

If you have a document that contains quite a few tables, you may be searching for a way to modify the width of all the tables in the document. For instance, your company standards may require that all tables be the same width, extending from the left to the right margin. If you have forty or more tables in a document, modifying the width of them all, individually, can be very tedious.

The following macro, ResizeAllTables, will quickly do what it says—resize all tables. The width of the tables are adjusted to fill the available margins.

Sub ResizeAllTables()
    Dim oTbl As Table
    For Each oTbl In ActiveDocument.Tables
        oTbl.AutoFitBehavior wdAutoFitFixed
        With ActiveDocument.PageSetup
            oTbl.PreferredWidth = .PageWidth - .LeftMargin - .RightMargin
        End With
    Next oTbl
End Sub

After the macro is complete, you will still want to examine each table to make sure that your column widths are appropriate for your data, but the overall width of the tables will be as you expected.

Tip #1382 applies to Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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Expanding Width of All Tables