Hidden Columns Problem in Excel

Hi there,

Been so annoyed to get rid of all the hidden columns after exporting my report to Excel which when I merge and centre then unhide, shows blank columns. The hidden column could appear in the middle of report or at the end of each report.

Known from somewhere that this might cause by the below mentioned facts and i've got some of the solutions with me but may i know is there a guideline to follow when designing a report for Excel and meanwhile get rid of hidden column's problem ?

i. The width of each and every tables are not aligned when there are more than 2 tables presented in a page vertically (each one on top of another) and therefore, gotta make sure the location from the left (start location) for all tables are the same, and the total width of the table are equal to the sum of width of each column, and also the length of every single column in all tables is align

--SOMEHOW, this is not enough to fix the problem and so i have to try steps ii (as follows).

ii. The text width in a field is greater than the width of the field. (Need to keep on trying for various width until the hidden column gone) e.g. i had allocate 2cm for a 'int' type field and apparently, i could see from preview the value just occupied bout half of the field. However, i need to expand the field to 3cm at last to accomodate the value or hidden column may appear when i export to Excel.

--SO, is there a way to know how much space a field needs and is data type affect the column width needed?

iii. Matrixes' width is greater than page width after expanding (This is hard to measure because we do not know how many columns a matrix is going to expand), and the best i could do is to set it less than or equal to the lenght of (page width - left margin -right margin) but somehow the hidden column still appear

-- ANY better solution to deal with this?

Any comment is welcome and thank you in advance!

Cheers,

Julez

Here is some information about merged cells with the Excel renderer:

http://blogs.msdn.com/chrisbal/archive/2006/07/08/659545.aspx

-Chris

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Hi Chris,

Thank you so much! This is really helpful!! =)

Cheers,

Julez