Yeah, all the widths are sort of inherently magic.

I think they're in some kind of "Excel Unit" and it depends on font choices anyway and I'm looking at these sheets in Numbers rather than Excel, so who knows.

If we don't set anything, the sheet opens up with every column very narrow so almost all data is hidden, so my general goal is just to give the columns a bit more breathing room so the sheet is a bit easier to work with. Users can always resize columns, the default behavior is just particularly unfriendly.

Here's the first sheet I exported before tweaking stuff, in Numbers:

Here's where stuff ended up:

A totally ideal approach which actually measured column widths and fit columns to data would produce a different result than that, but I think we're like 80% of the way there, and I'm not sure we have a practical way to do font metrics and fitting.

Some Googling suggests there's stuff we could maybe try, but that it's all guesses/estimates and may imply a large performance cost, e.g., https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16761897/phpexcel-auto-size-column-width

It's also probably bad to autosize some columns, like the task "Description" column, which might be "MMMMM..." and run the rest of the sheet into the shadow realm off the right hand side of the page. But maybe we could "autosize, with some maximum" or something.

It generally feels like we're probably past the point of diminishing returns to me since I think this behavior isn't bad, but maybe I'm overestimating the peril of trying the autosize stuff.