How do I adjust column widths in a table?

Question

I am trying to set the column widths for my table so that the width is not determined by the content. I used the code below which I found in other posts but no matter what size I make the columns there is no change in the column width. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

{| border="3"  style="text-align:center" bgcolor="#f5f5f5"
|+ Name of Table
! scope="col" style="width: 100pt;" | SAR Patriot #
! scope="col" style="width: 75pt;" | Indicators
|

Answer 1

What you have seems close to working. I modified it to this which worked:

{| border="3"  style="text-align:center" bgcolor="#f5f5f5"
|+ Name of Table
! scope="col" style="width: 100pt;" | SAR Patriot #
!! scope="col" style="width: 75pt;" | Indicators
!! scope="col" style="width: 200pt;" | Wide
|-
| num || ind || long text
|}

However - be aware that WikiTree does not want people to use the style="" in tables because it goes against WikiTree guidelines of embedding CSS style statements in biography text. See this help page.

Comments

Here is a simplified version that also works that doesn't break the WikiTree rules:

{| border="3"  style="text-align:center" bgcolor="#f5f5f5"
|+ Name of Table
! width=100pt | SAR Patriot #
!! width=75pt | Indicators
!! width=200pt | Wide
|-
| num || ind || long text
|}

---

Note that it will still increase the width to fit the longest word in the content. So if you want a really narrow table it needs have short words. E.g:

{| border="3"  style="text-align:center" bgcolor="#f5f5f5"
|+ Name of Table
! width=100pt | SAR Patriot #
!! width=5pt | I n d i c a t o r s
!! width=200pt | Wide
|-
| num || ind || long text
|}

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Rob, thanks for that. I tested this and it works. Yahoo!
My table has 11 columns and it seems like I would have to identify the kind of characters that will be in the field. Is that correct and is there a help page that will show the different kind of charcters in a field.

I will eliminate the CSS style=, if there is a way do this with Wiki Markup. So if you could recommend that as well it would be appreciated.

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I'm not sure what you mean by "the different kind of characters in a field"

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FYI if you just want to make your tables all the same width you can tell it to fit the whole table to the width of the page. Like this:

{| border="1" width="100%"
|- bgcolor=#E1F0B4
| Name || Relation || Status || Sex || Age || Occupation || Birth Place
|-
| Harry A Pavey || Head || Married || M || 38 || Picture frame maker || Plymouth, Devon, England
|}

---

Rob, it looks like you simply added 
|-
| num || ind || long text

for the columns. What is "num", "ind", "long text" that you added? I was thinking it was for the type of characters that were going to be in the column.

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No that was just sample content :)

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FYI there is an online tool that will convert a spreadsheet into a wiki table. I haven't tried it: https://magnustools.toolforge.org/tab2wiki.php

And this tool converts an HTML table to a WikiTable: http://bmanolov.free.fr/html2wiki-tables.php

Here is more documentation on Wiki Tables: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Tables