Tables in Help+Manual are a little different from what you may be used to if you have only worked with a word processor like MS Word up to now. This is necessary because most of the main output formats supported by Help+Manual are more like dynamic HTML pages than the static print-style pages produced by word processors.

Word processor tables are "static" – you define them once and they stay the same. In HTML and similar formats, tables can shrink and grow as the user changes the size of the browser or viewer window. This means that you need to be able to define both tables and table columns with dynamic widths that can change interactively, and you also need to plan the layout of your table content to accommodate this behavior.

This is also important for "static" formats like Word DOCX and PDF, because when you publish your project your tables must fit inside the margins of the page. For this to be possible, the table must be able to adjust to the width of the page when your topic is converted into a PDF or DOCX file.