Welcome new options for setting column widths automatically

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Power BI Desktop updates for October 2025 Part two of a three-part series of blogs
October sees the release of button slicers from preview and a very welcome feature to set table column widths automatically. The small changes introduced in the October 2025 Power BI update Welcome new options for setting column widths automatically (this blog) Two new options for the button slicer now fully emerged from preview

Power BI Desktop updates for October 2025

Part two of a three-part series of blogs

October sees the release of button slicers from preview and a very welcome feature to set table column widths automatically.

The small changes introduced in the October 2025 Power BI update
Welcome new options for setting column widths automatically (this blog)
Two new options for the button slicer now fully emerged from preview

Posted by Andy Brown on 05 November 2025

In this blog

The new table and column width options
Individual column widths
Automatically changing the table width

This table has two things wrong with it from a formatting point of view:

A table with lots of wasted space: the first column is wider than it needs to be, and there's lots of white space on the right.

The new table and column width options

You can now get rid of either or both of these problems with these new properties in the Column headers card of the table's formatting options:

The 2 options at the bottom let you specify how the width of the table and its component columns will behave.

Below is how each option works.

Individual column widths

You've been able to change the width of an individual column for some time now:

You can click or drag wtih the double-headed arrow shown to change the width of the first Region column in this example.

However if you choose the Fit to content property shown above Power BI will automatically change the size of your column depending on its contents:

If you filter out the (long) Yorkshire & Humberside region the column automatically narrows.

To this all I can say is: Hallelujah! Power BI report creators have been waiting for this Excel-type behaviour for many years.

Automatically changing the table width

In contrast to this you might choose these options:

Here each column will grow to make the table fill its available space.

Here's what this would give for the above example:

Both columns have grown by the same proportion to make the table fill its visual placeholder.

This is a feature which doesn't exist in Excel, although that could be because it's less useful. It also has a bug in it at the moment, it seems:

If your table visual has vertical scrollbars the final column will be slightly cropped on the right, as above.

The recommended solution to this annoying problem is to manually adjust the width of the final column after using this option, although my recommended soltuion would be to avoid Grow to fit altogether.

One useful option I've found: to reset automatic widths just turn the Auto-size width property off and then back on again. This will then lose any fixed column widths that you've set.

Parts of this blog
The small changes introduced in the October 2025 Power BI update Welcome new options for setting column widths automatically (this blog) Two new options for the button slicer now fully emerged from preview