See all this link, which provides some code to manually calculate the correct height for a row, based on the column width and cell content. I've not personally tested it. Also pasted below for convenience:
// Create Font object with Font attribute (e.g. Font family, Font size, etc) for calculation
java.awt.Font currFont = new java.awt.Font(fontName, 0, fontSize);
AttributedString attrStr = new AttributedString(cellValue);
attrStr.addAttribute(TextAttribute.FONT, currFont);
// Use LineBreakMeasurer to count number of lines needed for the text
FontRenderContext frc = new FontRenderContext(null, true, true);
LineBreakMeasurer measurer = new LineBreakMeasurer(attrStr.getIterator(), frc);
int nextPos = 0;
int lineCnt = 0;
while (measurer.getPosition() < cellValue.length())
{
nextPos = measurer.nextOffset(mergedCellWidth); // mergedCellWidth is the max width of each line
lineCnt++;
measurer.setPosition(nextPos);
}
Row currRow = currSht.getRow(rowNum);
currRow.setHeight((short)(currRow.getHeight() * lineCnt));
// The above solution doesn't handle the newline character, i.e. "\n", and only
// tested under horizontal merged cells.
row.Height = -1;
– Teakettle