This may be a couple of years old now, but I was messing around with this earlier today. Another option is to resize the actual figure window size/position to neatly contain the uitable.
It's a little bit of a hack in the sense that this code uses hardcoded constants to allow me to set to 'outerposition' with enough space for the window boundaries etc, but it does work. There's probably a more sophisticated property to set, but I got this code working and stopped searching...
It works by
1) get the actual size of the table and set the size of the uitable object to be that size.
2) get the figure size, and modify so that it is big enough to contain the uitable data.
h = figure;
data = rand(2,8);
u = uitable('Position',[20 20 500 70],'data',data);
table_extent = get(u,'Extent');
set(u,'Position',[1 1 table_extent(3) table_extent(4)])
figure_size = get(h,'outerposition');
desired_fig_size = [figure_size(1) figure_size(2) table_extent(3)+15 table_extent(4)+65];
set(h,'outerposition', desired_fig_size);
I was doing this becauses I wanted to print the table to png so that I had something quick/dirty to insert into a draft document without mucking about with exporting to excel and importing that etc etc.. For that purpose, printing to file works, but only really if you make sure that you are printing in high resolution - using the default 'saveas' means that that quality is unusable. (again, there's ways around this using saveas, but this one works for me.)
print('-dpng', filename, '-r0');
