Please reopen your question and improve it. Don’t forget OS name, LO version and save format.
Natively, there is no way to prevent automatic table expansion. Every cell is a Writer “sub-document” and cell will be expanded to hold the contents (just like pages are allocated to handle document size).
You can play with many parameters to control the global table size:
- column width
- configuration of cell paragraph style (spacing, indents, font size, …); eventually apply different styles to different columns/rows
- table parameters such as row height (but text may then be clipped)
- use a landscape page if the table is wider than tall
Also, it is imperative not to create your table with so-called “table styles” (use exclusively None). Otherwise, as soon as you modify anything in your cells, the underlying macros fire and reformat the table to their built-in specifications, wiping your formatting. So tell us how you created the table.
What do you mean by “distribute [lines] evenly”? Which menu command (if any)? Do you want to freeze row height?
For best advice, attach a sample document and explain clearly the expected result from an author’s point view (don’t explain the steps you followed).
