Why might powerpoint not let me adjust the height of a table row?

Question

Powerpoint is fighting me every time I try to adjust the height of a table row, and I'm wondering if folks have ideas why that might be the case.

See the attached picture; the Argentina row is of height 0.41", while the Nicaragua row is 0.61". Whenever I change to change the Nicaragua row (either by manually moving the row line, or by typing in a new height into the box) powerpoint immediately resets it. The difference? The Argentina row I typed in directly, while the Nicaragua row I pasted in from Excel.

Thoughts what might be the difference?

Answer 1

Ah, I understand; for some reason it was inserting several extra spaces into each cell (padding?), which made it impossible to scale down their size.

Answer 2

The length of the row is based on the font size accordingly. Change the font size, and you will be able to adjust the height.

Answer 3

Thought I would add that I was stuck with this as well. What got me was that all my cells with content were size 10, but an empty cell had a font size of 18 and even though contained no content, was preventing the row from resizing.

Answer 4

This has happened to me. This especially happens when copying a table from MS Word to PowerPoint. Before, I have found the solution, I had dropped and dragged the border of the row to change the height with no success. The solution is very simple. You need to do a small investigation looking for white spaces inside your tables' cells. After you ensure the white spaces of the entire row cells are removed, try to change the height of the row by dropping and dragging or through the height text box in the Table Tools tabs. You should not have any problem then.

Answer 5

Reduce the margins of each cell, as follows:

Instructions for PowerPoint 2010. Select all the text within the table and click Table Tools (on the ribbon). Select the Layout tab. Click on Cell Margins in the Alignment group. Select None (or specify your own size in the Custom margins dialog).

This should reduce the row height to the minimum possible for the current font height.

See also: https://support.office.com/en-ie/article/Move-or-resize-a-table-b7cea04e-2b96-4cd3-ba89-f8ef0adabf19#bm3

Answer 6

Just experienced this now. The problem for our table was the Line Spacing Options.

Paragraph section of the Home tab: click on Line Spacing icon and select Line Spacing Options...

The Spacing section of the dialog box had Line Spacing: "Exactly" At "56 pt" In other words, the line spacing was specified at the equivalent of 56 pt font! Once we changed the Line Spacing option in that dialog box to "Single", the problem was resolved.

Answer 7

I know this question is years old, but I came across the same issue today. Tables from excel were not formatting correctly in powerpoint. I'm not sure if this will fix your issue or not, but this worked for me.

I noticed that numbers formatted in excel as "Custom" did not format well in excel. I notice you have a number with a comma separator; I had these as well, and they tended to be formatted as a "Custom" number. What did the trick for me was simply selecting the numbers in excel and changing the number format to "General" or "Number." If currency symbols are present, you might wan't to also make sure the format is "Currency" rather than "Accounting."

You can change the number format by selecting the range of cells > right click > format cells. A "Format Cells" dialog box will appear. Click the "Number" tab, and then choose your desired number format (again, for this issue I'd suggest "General" or "Number").

Hope this helps!

Answer 8

You might also check cell margins of each cell in the row; that was the cause of my issue.