[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Well, what I had in mind was this: If I drag the column markers on the ruler
or the cell boundaries in the table while pressing Alt, dragging to get a
column, say, 1.8" wide (as reported by the ScreenTip), then go to Table
Properties, the Column tab reports the column width as 1.95".

Or try this: In a new document based on Normal.dot, create a four-column
table. Set the preferred table width to 100% (which means 6" in a document
based on the default Normal.dot). Then sum the "preferred" widths of the
columns (1.54" each). It will be 6.16. Fair enough: that's 6" plus the 0.08"
on each side that hangs over the margin. But the ruler will report the width
of each column as 1.39", making it difficult to switch back and forth
between ruler and Table Properties. Sometimes you can't drag the column
boundaries with fine enough control, so you think you'll set the width
exactly in Table Properties, but the amount you set there is not the same as
the result you get on the ruler.

As long as you know what's going on, you can "translate," but if you don't
have to do this very often, it can be very confusing.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

"JimB" wrote in message
...
The strange thing is that I have no problems with the column width even
with
the margins at .25". They display and print properly.

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:

I agree that it seems unsatisfactory. I find the settings for column
width
equally unsatisfactory--pretty much impossible to get them right if you
have
any cell margins.