Question: I'm trying to place a series of JLabels at specific X and Y coordinates on a JPanel (and set its height and width, too). No matter what I do, each label winds up immediately to the right of the previous label and has the exact same size as all of the others. 

Right now, my Jpanel is in a Grid Layout. I've tried Absolute Layout (illegal argument exception results), Free Design (no labels appear), Flow Layout (everything just gets squeezed to the center), and a few others.

Not sure what I need to do to make this work. Can anyone help? Thanks!

```
JLabel lbl1 = new JLabel("label 1");
JLabel lbl2 = new JLabel("label 2");
JLabel lbl3 = new JLabel("label 3");
JLabel lbl4 = new JLabel("label 4");
JLabel lbl5 = new JLabel("label 5");

myPanel.add(lbl1);
myPanel.add(lbl2);
myPanel.add(lbl3);
myPanel.add(lbl4);
myPanel.add(lbl5);

lbl1.setLocation(27, 20);
lbl2.setLocation(123, 20);
lbl3.setLocation(273, 20);
lbl4.setLocation(363, 20);
lbl5.setLocation(453, 20);

lbl1.setSize(86, 14);
lbl2.setSize(140, 14);
lbl3.setSize(80, 14);
lbl4.setSize(80, 14);
lbl5.setSize(130, 14);

```

Answer: 
You have to set your container's Layout to null:

```
myPanel.setLayout(null);

```

However is a good advise also to take a look at the Matisse Layout Manager, I guess it is called GroupLayout now. The main problem with absolute positioning is what happens when the window changes its size.
My advise is to use an IDE like [NetBeans](http://netbeans.org) with its GUI editor. To inspect the code and because there are many ways:

Setting the layout manager, or for absolute positioning doing a myPanel.setLayout(null), has several influences.

In general, assuming you do your calls in the constructor of a JFrame, you can call `pack()` to start the layouting.

Then, every layout manager uses its own implementation of `add(Component)` or `add(Component, Constraint)`. BorderLayout's usage is with add(label, BorderLayout.CENTER) and so on.