Generating protected excel sheets

I am using a servlet to generate an excel sheet.
The code is given below:

protected void service(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) 
	throws ServletException, IOException {
		// TODO Auto-generated method stub
		List<String> reportList = new ArrayList<String>();
		reportList.add("Qwerty1");
		reportList.add("Qwerty2");
		reportList.add("Qwerty3");
		reportList.add("Qwerty4");
		reportList.add("Qwerty5");
		reportList.add("Qwerty6");
		reportList.add("Qwerty7");
		reportList.add("Qwerty8");
		reportList.add("Qwerty9");

request.getAttribute("fgfg");

response.setContentType("application/vnd.ms-excel");
		PrintWriter out=response.getWriter();
		out.println("<HTML>" +"<table border=\"1\">");

String temp = reportList.get(0);

out.println("<H1><tr> <th>Emp ID:  </th><th>Emp Name</th><th>Marks</th></tr></H1>");
		for(int i = 0; i<reportList.size(); i++)
		{
			out.println("<tr>");
			out.println("<td>"+temp+"</td>");
			out.println("<td></td>");
			out.println("<td></td>");
			out.println("</tr>");
		}
		out.println("</table>"+"</HTML>");

}

I want to make the first column of the excel sheet readonly.
Please help!!

You're not generating an Excel document, you're generating HTML, which some spreadsheet applications (like Excel) happen to be able to read. If you want to use actual spreadsheet-like functionality, you'll need to generate actual XLS or XLSX documents, possibly using a library like Apache POI.

I'm not sure it's possible to protect individual columns, though; I seem to recall that being a per-sheet (or even per-file) setting.

thanks tim.
is there some other way of generating an excel sheet from a jsp sheet wherein we can have a column as write protected???

I'd start by finding out if Excel even supports this functionality; as I said, I'm not sure it does.

Tim Moores wrote:I'd start by finding out if Excel even supports this functionality; as I said, I'm not sure it does.

It does.

The functionality that TS is looking for is specified in the CellStyle interface. (http://poi.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/poi/ss/usermodel/CellStyle.html).

The implementation of it is done in http://poi.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/poi/hssf/usermodel/HSSFCellStyle.html and there you can define a style and use the setLock(true) on the column by setting the columnStyle on the sheet.