PHPExcel is a phenomenal Excel generating library for PHP which I have mentioned on this site numerous times before, and which is currently my defacto way for quickly knocking out all those annoying Excel downloads that clients always seem to MUST have! ;)

Today’s quick code tip is on how to specify or set the width of individual columns in your worksheet.

In order to do this, we make use of the handy setWidth function that allows us to specify the width of our targeted column using the standard Excel column width units.

So let’s see this in code then:

$workbook = new PHPExcel;
$sheet = $workbook->getActiveSheet();
$sheet->getColumnDimension('A')->setWidth(15);
$sheet->getColumnDimension('B')->setWidth(30);
$sheet->getColumnDimension('C')->setWidth(45);
$writer = new PHPExcel_Writer_Excel5($workbook);
header('Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel');
$writer->save('php://output');

And there you go, as simple as that!

Related Link: http://phpexcel.codeplex.com