ExcelBanter - Preserving HTML Column Widths in Excel

I have a web application that needs to export portions of certain pages to
Excel. To accomplish this I am generating the appropriate file with
properly-formatted HTML and downloading them. It all works except that the
column widths specified in the HTML are not being respected by Excel. I
tried creating a simple HTML file on my local system, saving it both as an
HTML file and as an XLS file. When I open the HTML file with IE it is
formatted correctly. When I open the XLS file with Excel, again the column
widths are not respected. A simple example is included below.

Is there a way to get Excel to properly recognize the column widths
specified in the HTML? Thanks in advance for your help.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
<head
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /
<titleUntitled Document</title
</head

<body
<table width="576" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"
<tr
<td width="576"
<table width="576"
<tr
<td width="576"
<table width="576"
<tr
<td width="300"1</td
<td width="200"2</td
<td width="76"3</td</tr
<tr
<td width="300"4</td
<td width="200"5</td
<td width="76"6</td
</tr
<tr
<td width="300"7</td
<td width="200"8</td
<td width="76"9</td
</tr
<tr
<td width="300"10</td
<td width="200"11</td
<td width="76"12</td
</tr
</table
</td
</tr
<tr
<td width="576"
<table width="576"
<tr
<td width="300"Line 1</td
<td width="200"Col2</td
<td width="76"Col3</td
</tr
<tr
<td width="300"This is the second line</td
<td width="200"Column 2 of the second line</td
<td width="76"This is the third column of the second line. It is
the longest column.</td
</tr
<tr
<td width="300"1</td
<td width="200"2</td
<td width="76"3</td
</tr
</table
</td
</tr
<tr
<td width="576"
<table width="576"
<tr
<td width="300"a</td
<td width="200"b</td
<td width="76"c</td
</tr
<tr
<td width="300"d</td
<td width="200"e</td
<td width="76"f</td
</tr
</table
</td
</tr
</table
</td
</tr
</table
</body
</html