Thread: Excel Report

I have a excel report that I created and now I need help with the formating. The report is currently hand written and follows a certain format in order to fit all the information on one page if printed. Now the problem is the report goes down and then to the right. Under each column is a supervisor's name and under that is the information regarding all of the projects information that supervisor is responsible including who is assigned to each project. Sort of like the following.


Supervisor A Supervisor B Supervisor C
Project Info Project Info Project Info
Employees Employees Employees
Project Info Project Info Project Info
Employees Employees Employees

I need to know if there is way to write the report in the code that will allow me to write down a column then come back to the top of the column to the right if so then how. Or if there is any tutorial I can follow to get sort of close to what I need. I tried searching but couldn't find anything.

Below is a breif sample of my code for the report.

public boolean generateTechPhotoReport(Calendar passedDate, String passedFileName){
 
StringBuffer reportOutput = new StringBuffer();
 
reportOutput.append("Project #/ Title, Start Time, Start Date\n");
 
BufferedWriter out = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(passedFileName));
out.write(reportOutput.toString());
out.close();
 
}

I was thinking about doing the report in memory also, I have done that with other reports. I did that with a report that generates the employees that are off from a selected date plus 7. I used Vectors to hold the data for each day. The reason I don't think I would be able to it with this report is there may be different amount of supervisors from one day to the next. Do you know of a way to handle this?

I forgot to post that I figured a way to fix my issue. I did it by writing it to a pdf instead of excel and I used nested tables. I a little like the following.

 
try {
//Create the Document
Document document = new Document(PageSize.LETTER.rotate());
//Create the PDF writer
PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.getInstance(document, new FileOutputStream(passedFileName));
//Open the document
document.open();
 
//The table for other tables to be nested in
PdfPTable fullTable = new PdfPTable(1);
fullTable .setWidthPercentage(100);
 
//Set the table so each supervisor has a column, nested table
PdfPTable supervisorTable = new PdfPTable(numOfCol);
//numOfCol was determined by the size of the result set that I got back 
 
 
PdfPTable projectTable = new PdfPTable(sizeForTable);
 
PdfPCell cell;
 
for(int i = 0; i < numOfCol; i++){ //Used for loop to get each supervisor into the column header
 
String currentSupervisorsName = "Supervisor " + Integer.toString(i);
cell = new PdfPCell(new Paragraph(currentSupervisorsName, fontBold));
cell.setBorderWidth(1);
supervisorTable.addCell(cell);
 
//Nested Table, needed to be empty each time through so I add this table to projectTable 
PdfPTable projectInformationTable = new PdfPTable(1);
 
cell = new PdfPCell(new Paragraph(/*data*/, fontNormal));
cell.setBorderWidth(1);
projectInformationTable.addCell(cell);
 
projectTable.addCell(projectInformationTable);
}
 
 
fullTable.addCell(supervisorTable);
fullTable.addCell(projectTable);
 
 
document.add(fullTable);
document.close();
 
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Unable to load reports at this time. Please try again later.", "Application Error", JOptionPane.ERROR_MESSAGE);
}