If you attach the screen capture of your problem, then it would be helpful. Jasper will never make these kind of problems. You might have placed any other fields under the column you did specify in this post, which does not have same positioning as the above said columns left and width. For ex. you have field "Product name" as a column with header and detail, say left=100, width=200. In the footer of the page you have some copyright message in a field, its left=50 and width=300, then your product namme column will be spanned to show in three cells. Let me know if you didn't understand.