[Creeper1313]

Interesting. We have one user (so far) reporting this same behavior today on her Word 2003/Windows XP system at our 50 person company (got to this forum/thread via google).

Odd that it would have seemingly reared it's head in 2005 and then waited until January 2011 to crop up again. Perhaps some bug introduced in this week's Windows Updates? If so, strange that it's affecting her Word but not mine and another co-worker's. I had her send me a file she was experiencing it in as a test... columns resize fine in my copy of Word 2003 (same behavior that ChristieD reported 6 years ago).

I'd be interested in anyone else has any ideas on a cause/fix. Probably going to resort to reinstalling Office on her machine if this persists.

GG, have you installed any other--even 3rd party--software recently before this cropped up? My user couldn't think of any, but maybe some common thread can be found if you name something that jogs her memory.

Originally Posted by GG Bodge

AArrgghh!!!! Please help. I woke up this morning and gremlins attacked my computer overnight. I'm having the same problems with my table resizing as the previous posts - "....stopped allowing me to resize by dragging, I can't drag any of the previously created tables columns to a width I want, either in this doc or in any doc - even a new doc I create with a new table. I can resize the columns the manual way (table properties - slow and tedious) or via the ruler. But I cannot resize by dragging the column widths".. Even more strangely, I can click and drag to adjust row height, but not column width.

I have done all the tweeking and restarting etc. of the computer with no success. I am a long-term user of Word and consider myself to know the ins and outs of the program. But I can't figure this one out and yes this drives me crazy.

Anyone else had this problem and solved it since the last post all those years ago.

[handeiere]

Originally Posted by Creeper1313

Interesting. We have one user (so far) reporting this same behavior today on her Word 2003/Windows XP system at our 50 person company (got to this forum/thread via google).

Odd that it would have seemingly reared it's head in 2005 and then waited until January 2011 to crop up again. Perhaps some bug introduced in this week's Windows Updates? If so, strange that it's affecting her Word but not mine and another co-worker's. I had her send me a file she was experiencing it in as a test... columns resize fine in my copy of Word 2003 (same behavior that ChristieD reported 6 years ago).

I'd be interested in anyone else has any ideas on a cause/fix. Probably going to resort to reinstalling Office on her machine if this persists.

GG, have you installed any other--even 3rd party--software recently before this cropped up? My user couldn't think of any, but maybe some common thread can be found if you name something that jogs her memory.

I'd be interested in anyone else has any ideas on a cause/fix. Probably going to resort to reinstalling Office on her machine if this persists.

[Paul_In_Tbilisi]

Originally Posted by handeiere

I'd be interested in anyone else has any ideas on a cause/fix. Probably going to resort to reinstalling Office on her machine if this persists.

A workaround and clue to the underlying problem...

I just got this same problem today using Word 2003. I'm still not sure what the root problem was but - in my case - I had two documents open which were nearly identical. These were document templates I'd been sent to use with a heavily tabulated cover sheet.

I had to close one of these down before I could drag columns by their border lines again.

This didn't just affect documents based on that template - I opened a blank document and inserted a table. So long as I had both of those other documents open I couldn't drag columns in my new blank document either (or in any other open documents). Closing one of those two near-identical documents cleared the problem in all other open documents.

So, I found a work around which might give someone a clue as to why it happened. There were no macros that I could see in any of these documents, though the two document templates did include a few cold fields linked to the document properties sheet. Other than something screwy going on with the column width settings in these documents somehow causing a conflict, that's the only thing which was out of the ordinary with these docs.