On Fri, 29 Mar 2013 20:12:12 +0100, Claus Busch
wrote:

Hi George,

Am Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:05:29 -0400 schrieb George:

If you wouldn't mind elaborating, what does "visible cols" refer to?
This sheet does not have any 'hidden' cols. 'Show comments' is not
enabled for any cells. (ie, comments are only visible on mouse
fly-over.) The cells in question contain zero, one, or two characters.

please have a look:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/211769/en-us

Just in case anyone stumbles on this thread, I'll report how things
turned out:

AFAIK, the only 'objects' in this worksheet are comments. And, as
noted, if all comments are deleted, the column widths can be shrunk
without any problems.

Per the link, I re-formatted all comments in a group of columns to "move
and size with cell". Over a subset of these modified columns, the
re-size operation still failed. But, if the right-most of these columns
was omitted, the re-size worked.

To see if there was some un-fixed cell in that offending column, I
deleted all its comments. Re-size still failed. Likewise, when all
comments in each of the adjacent columns were _separately_ deleted.
However, if I simultaneously delete all comments in all three of these
columns, the re-size works over the subset in question.

This is beyond my skill set. I will just work around the problem, by
deleting _all_ comments when I want to view the sheet with the reduced
column width.

G