Question

I want to have this ,
but instead have this .
Please note, when I change VerticalAlign.Middle to VerticalAlign.Top it actually works as expected.
Please see below code that I am trying:

   // I assume that table table is already created and well-defined  
   // Create a new row

    TableRow tRow = new TableRow();

    tRow.HorizontalAlign = HorizontalAlign.Center;

    // add the row to the table

    table.Rows.Add(tRow);

    // Create a new cell

    TableCell tCell = new TableCell();

    tCell.VerticalAlign = VerticalAlign.Middle; // Want to get it in the middle of two merged rows

    tCell.RowSpan = 2;

    tCell.Text = "England";

    tCell.Font.Bold = true;

    tRow.Cells.Add(tCell);

    // Create new cell

    tCell = new TableCell();

    tCell.Text = "2010";

    tCell.Font.Bold = true;

    tRow.Cells.Add(tCell);

    // Create new row

    tRow = new TableRow();

    // add the row to the table

    table.Rows.Add(tRow);

    // Create new cell

    tCell = new TableCell();

    tCell.Text = "2011";

    tCell.Font.Bold = true;

    tRow.Cells.Add(tCell);

Update: Please see extra code below. I don’t have html code as such, but I looked at sw.ToString() and formatting looks right but still excel file does not seem to be rightly formatted. My browser is IE but I think it does not matter.
I tried tCell.CssClass = “className”; result is the same.

public static void Comparison_Report(string fileName)
{
HttpContext.Current.Response.Clear();
HttpContext.Current.Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", string.Format("attachment; filename={0}", fileName));
HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentType = "application/ms-excel";
using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter())
{
using (HtmlTextWriter htw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw))
{
// Create a table to contain the grid
Table table = new Table();

///----- Original code goes here----

// render the table into the htmlwriter
table.RenderControl(htw);
// render the htmlwriter into the response  
HttpContext.Current.Response.Write(sw.ToString());
HttpContext.Current.Response.End();
}

}

}

Answer 1

Finally i’ve tested it by myself. It seems not to work in Excel if you use valign="middle" on your table-cell. You must use CSS.

So instead of

tCell.VerticalAlign = VerticalAlign.Middle

do

tCell.Style.Add("vertical-align", "middle")

That will align the text correctly in excel. Excel itself uses css-classes if you export it from excel to html.

But repeating my comment, i would recommend to generate a real excel file instead of creating html that might be openened and interpreted correctly.
It’s very simple with EPPlus: Exporting data to excel