Recommend me a solution for generating print preview and printing

I've had a couple of thoughts about this problem over the past several hours, though they still feel rather kludgy.

1) You could populate an excel spreadsheet, then auto-set the width of the cells such that they are wide enough for the data in each column. When this is done, you could then query excel for the column widths and use these to generate (in your application) a printable document. This would get more than a little hairy if the cells contained formulas or were formatted as numbers/date/currency etc.

2. Perhaps you could password protect the sheet after generation and before print-preview. This would alleviate the possibility that the user could alter the data manually.

3. You could generate pdf documents, which are by their nature, not easily edited.

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1. This would still get rather 'interesting' when it came to formatting the data, i.e text-colours/text-fonts would require some extra work. Locale-specific currency/number formatting could also be a royal pain in the you-know-what. Also, I don't remember just how excel treats images - whether they actually are contained in the cells, or simply sit above them at whatever size you specify - like buttons, for instance.

2. This would be my preferred option if password protection was feasible from VBA/Automation. If a password could programmatically be applied, you'd have the best of many worlds.
(a) text colour/fonts
(b) number/currency with the correct locale specific formatting
(c) you could have a soft-copy of the hard-copy. This would easily be scale-able to different paper sizes/formats - i.e foolscap or a4.

3) I wrote code to generate PDFs a few years back, which was used to generate timetables for students or staff or rooms or subjects. That would allow me to attach files, 'print' files to the pdf or just create the pdf on the fly from a database COM server. It did have a few bugs, but worked in the majority of cases (about 3 or 4 in 1300 timetables consistently had problems) The code was basically a port of the PHP library, fPdf, with a few extra features. I would not recommend this method personally.
This would provide very few (if any) advantage over generating a print-preview using c++ (only), with the addition of a couple of nasty gotchas.
a) The page-size is fixed, which makes printing in different orientations/paper sizes rather more difficult.
b) You still have to format the tables yourself, by measuring the width of the text in every cell of each column, before setting the column width to the largest value + some value for the margins.
c) PDFs are nasty things to generate and the quantity of code required to do so is rather surprising. ~100kb of source, also a dependence on the zlib library to provide the flate compression method. (My Pdf generation code is also a pain in the backside to debug, in my experience) - you'd be welcome to the code, as it was a 'because I can' excercise that I did at night - but I certainly wouldn't try PDF unless all other avenues were investigated first.

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The XAMPP (Apache, MySql, Php, Perl) distribution includes code to generate PDFs from a sample music cd database. This demonstrates how to go about formatting the table and measuring the width of each column. Php is close enough to C/C++ that many things can be simply copy/pasted - the remainder can be dealt with via the Php manual or by browsing StackOverflow.

If password protection of the generated excel/word files wasn't possible, I'd probably just code something myself to create the reports in plain old win32 c++. Dealing with images would be probably the easiest too, since you've got a wide range of available formats thanks to GDI+. Also, you don't need to worry about extracting the pixel-data or of investigating the various PDF stream-types in order to embed jpg images (not sure that png is natively supported in pdfs - my work was based on the 1.2 and