"That depends." In the Table Properties dialog you can set "preferred
widths" for cells and columns. These will be maintained provided that (a)
you don't allow auto resizing, which can be disabled in the Table Options
dialog (click Options... on the Table tab of Table Properties) and (b) you
don't change them by manually dragging the column borders. The way this
seems to work is that Word sometimes decides on its own to define the
current width of a column as the "preferred width" and won't let you change
it, but of course if you don't *want* it to change, it will!
