The accepted answer works fine, but it does not apply to the case when most of the width of the columns does not matter, but 1-2 columns should have a fixed width (or at least not shrink).
One workflow is to force the width of a column to determine the contents of a fixed width. Something like that:
<td title="'TheTitle'" sortable="'PassedStr'"> <div style="width:120px"> <b>{{item.SomeCol}}</b> <span ng-show="item.ErrorMessage"> {{item.OtherCol}} </span> </div> </td>
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