Disclaimer:
Before I get the standard "this has been asked 1000 times", let me say that yes, I know. I have read and read and read. Looked at JarJar and One-JAR but the problem is: I am self-taught with only a couple of months of experience under me and I am not familiar with Ant or Maven or anything other than vanilla Java. I use NetBeans as my compiler, just to add.
I have written an application for use at my job. It is just a small app that takes certain input and writes it to an Excel file. I downloaded jexcelapi (jxl.jar) and placed that appropriately. I have no trouble running the file inside of NetBeans or from within the dist/ folder after it is built. Therein lies the problem: if I move the app to, say, the Desktop, I get an error from the JVM saying "A Java Exception has occurred." I know that this is due to the fact that the main class is added to the .JAR automatically but to add another lib, I will have to make a "Class-path" statement within my Manifest. I tried that unsuccessfully. I have tried moving the actual jxl.jar file to my jdk folder and I tried calling the entire file path that points directly to the jxl.jar file into my Manifest. The closest I can get is building the .JAR in NetBeans and it adds the lib folder to the dist folder where the app .JAR is.
I want to distribute this app as just a single .JAR without having to send all the users a copy of the jexcelapi lib. It doesn't have to be a .JAR within a .JAR; it can be whatever way is easiest and simplest. As stated before, I am not familiar with Ant and One-Jar draws on that. I am still learning; can someone point me in the right direction with this? Thank you!