Excel problem

The Christmas season has been hellacious. Deadlines to catch up with at the start of the next year meant crunch time for most of the past two weeks. So, for my first blog post on my first rest day in a while, I'll bring home some work.

I have a problem with Excel. I'm writing a web app that generates HTML files which are exported to Excel. In most cases, it's easy, I just follow the template generated by using Excel->File->Save As->HTML

However, I've encountered a problem. One of my reports needs to show two tables side-by-side in Excel, but I have to generate the rows for each table independently (i.e. from separate SQL queries). My first thought was to use tables-within-a-table in the HTML source, but it seems that Excel loses the column widths (i.e., the column widths change from what I've set them to before) when I try to create a new table inside one of the existing s

I need to preserve the widths of the columns outside the inner table. Any idea how this can be done? Or maybe someone can point me to online resources that might help?

Unfortunately, this has been sort of a low-pri task for me, so I haven't had much time to check it out; but the deadline is creeping up on me fast. I've posted on some forums and asked around, but no positive responses so far. Any assistance is appreciated.