unwanted and unchangeable row spacing in tables

[erik2000]

I have a legacy docx file created in Microsoft Word 2008.



Whenever I create a table in this document, the table rows are created with a minimum vertical size. The text in the cells take up less than half of this vertical space. I want to reduce the size of the table row to match the size of the text in the row. How can I do this?

When I move the mouse directly over the line that separates the two rows, the mouse arrow changes to an icon of an equal sign with an arrow pointing out of the top and an arrow pointing out of the bottom. The mouse can now resize the vertical size of the row. I can increase the size of the row, but I cannot make it smaller than about 2x my font size.

I have no problem changing this on new Word documents I create with Word 2011, but not on these docx files. There must be a setting somewhere. Can someone help me?

But I cannot make the rows smaller to match the size of the text.