How to adjust padding in table cell

Solution 1:

In Microsoft Office 365 Pro on Windows 10, I found two different ways of doing this, depending on what you find easier.

The first is to select all the text in the cell and edit the space before and after for top and bottom in the Layout tab (see screenshot), and adjust the carets on the rulers as indicated above for left and right.

MS Word Table Padding by Text spacing method

The second option is to move the mouse to the left of the table until the mouse pointer turns to a right-facing arrow and then click once to select the whole table. The Table Tools menu becomes available. Click the dark blue Layout tab under Table Tools (not the lighter medium blue Layout tab for the overall document) and then click Cell Margins. Once the Cell Margins popup is displayed (see screenshot) you can then edit the top, bottom, left and right.

MS Word Table Padding by Cell Margins method

Solution 2:

I have tested this on MS Word 2013, so I don't know if this would work on other version.

  1. Create the table

  2. Select the Cell (not sure if this would work for whole table)

  3. Right Click on the selected Cell and choose Table Properties

  4. Under Table Properties - Cell - Choose "Options"

  5. Cell Margins - untick "Same as the whole table" and then drop the margin to 0cm for left and right.

  6. This should drop the left margin to touching the line. And then you can manually move the line to do a fit like the image below. I tried double-click to let it auto-fit at 0cm margin, but its not doing it, so have to manually move it to fit to that size.

    enter image description here

I know this is not the best way of doing it, but it is a workaround. Maybe you can find a method to do it for the whole table.

Hope it helps.

Darius