Sorry to say that I do not, no.
I also use JExcel and it works in the same way, you apply the formatting to
the cell and not the column.
The only other option I could think of is OLE. It is NOT for the
fainthearted, in fact Microsoft advise against using it to 'drive' Excel.
Their argument is that Excel relies on interacting with the user to resolve
problems and OLE does not support this, that there are problems with
multi-threaded access to the application and so on. However, if you are
prepared for the work then there is a possible course of action open to you.
When IBM wrote the Eclipse platform originally, they included the SWT or
Standard Widget Toolkit. One of the packages built into the SWT is an OLE
package that does allow you to take full control over Excel. If you have ever
written an Excel macro - using VBA - you will know just what I am talking
about. A long time ago, I wrote a very simple class that demonstrated how to
use the OLE package but it is not, I must emphasise, a trivial task. What you
are actually doing is executing VBA commands. Just to give you some idea, this
is VBA - Columns("A:A").Select - it is the command that selects all of the
cells in column A. To automate this using OLE you would obtain what is called
an OLEAutomation object that refers to the worksheet, use this to obtain
another OLEAutomation object for the Columns entity and then use this to
execute the select command. It can be quite labour intensive as you need to
work your way through the Excel Object Model to find just the
property/method you need.
If you wish, I will try to look out that class and let you have it but I can
offer no guarantees. You will also need to obtain the archive for the SWT and
ensure that this is included on your classpath but that is easy enough to do.
Of course, if you use Eclipse as your development environment, then you have
most of the tools you need.
Madhav Sadhu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi Anthony,
Thanks for the quick reply.
I tried this approach before and it works, but the issue is, I need to serve
this xls over the web to the client browser.
This will increase the download time and network traffic if I create a huge
XLS file with blank rows and send it across the web.
User might end up using 10 rows, whereas I have to send a file with
65000(this is the maximun number that is alowed in xls I guess) rows.
Are you aware of any licensed tools which will allow to set formatting at
Column level (No JNI wrappers over COM components since my environment is
linux) ?
Thanks
Madhav
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthony Andrews"
To: "POI Users List"
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2006 12:02 PM
Subject: Re: Problem with Cell formatting at columns level
> As far as I am aware, there is no way to apply a format to a column -
that is too all of the cells in a column - using a single command. What you
will have to do is add blank cells to the column in question; perhaps
surprisingly, it is possible to set the format for Blank cells. That should
ensure that the format of the cells in the column is set ready for your
users to enter data.
>
> I have to admit however, that I have not tried this myself but I believe
it will work.
>
> Madhav Sadhu wrote: Hello,
>
> I need to format the entire column of an excel. Currently, the only way I
> can do it is by assigning a format to all the cells. However, for my
> requirement, I need to create a blank excel sheet with the columns
> formatted, so that when users use that excel to fill in data, they donot
do
> need to worry about putting the data in a proper format.
>
> I had posted this in the bug list and sent an email also on the same but
> could not get any help. Any help in this matter is greatley appreciated.
>
> Thanks
> Madhav
>
>
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