Worksheet.set_column() sets the column width only once

Inside the method:

    out = StringIO.StringIO()
    workbook = xlsxwriter.workbook.Workbook(out)
    worksheet = workbook.add_worksheet()

    worksheet.set_column('A:A', 1)
    worksheet.set_column('A:A', 100)

    workbook.close()
    out.seek(0)
    return out

Expected outcome:

Actual outcome:

I don’t think it’s a LibreOffice issue this time, because the width is, in fact, set - but only once.

[jmcnamara]

By the way, what’ll happen if try to do this vise versa, first assigning default styles to each column individually - and then applying the custom styles to a range of columns?

The last range will show up in Excel. The first in LibreOffice.

Instead you should do something like the following, which will work without a bug fix in LibreOffice/Excel:

import xlsxwriter

workbook = xlsxwriter.workbook.Workbook('col_width.xlsx')
worksheet = workbook.add_worksheet()

colwidths = {}

# Store the defaults.
for col in range(50):
    colwidths[col] = 5

# Then override any that you want.
colwidths[4] = 15

# Then set the column widths.
for col_num, width in colwidths.items():
    worksheet.set_column(col_num, col_num, width)

workbook.close()

[jmcnamara]

So, will I not be able to, say, set the same width for the a range - and then set the width for an individual column within that range?

No.

It might work in Excel but probably not in LibreOffice.

When you split a column range in Excel you get n+1 ranges. For example this:

worksheet.set_column('A:E', 20)
worksheet.set_column('C:C', 30)

In Excel would be:

worksheet.set_column('A:B', 20)
worksheet.set_column('C:C', 30)
worksheet.set_column('D:E', 20)

If you have a small number of columns (<1000) then I would recommend just setting each one individually. Like this:

import xlsxwriter

workbook = xlsxwriter.workbook.Workbook('col_width.xlsx')
worksheet = workbook.add_worksheet()

for col in range(50):
    worksheet.set_column(col, col, 20)

# Then override any that you want.
worksheet.set_column(4, 4, 50)

workbook.close()

Note, this won’t work in LibreOffice until after the bug fix for this issue but it currently works with Excel.