hi tom, as i did my xls reports, i come to some conclusions. 1. excel is not as easy to handle as pdf. so row and band height and width must be aligned and adjusted ver very carefully. the best well be to work with the absolut pixel count. 2. why strech with overflow is a bad thing when it comes to excel? see 1. :) you can not say what the exact height is when the engine streches the cell. better is to disable this function and set the "net.sf.jasperreports.print.keep.full.text" to TRUE, for each cell. so the original dimension will not be changed and the content is complete. the jrxml file in your designer mode in ireport must look excactly like the outcoming xls file! that was the only way i fixed my excel export problems. in your case i would half the first row height ,so that everything in the first row has the same height. just give the subsystem column a little more width. then disable for all fields the strech with overflow and insert the propertie i mentioned above. that should do it good luck steff Post Edited by kingsteff at 05/12/2009 14:06 Post Edited by kingsteff at 05/12/2009 14:08