| I just tried it and I see what you mean. You can either autofit the text in a single cell, or merge several cells together but not both.
Will have a play around between meetings and see what I come up with.
You can't specify page width per se, but you can add together a bunch of columns to get the width that you want (eg if your standard column is 8.43, you can group together more and more columns until you get the width that you want). | 
Hybrid Mode
