I don't know about smarter, this is actually quite smart. I would just add a comment on the formatRowDummy line to explain the treble escaping of the % character (it has to survive going through two sprintf).
If the format string becomes even more complex, then probably the best thing is to revert to a loop (either explicit for or arrayfun) building each subpart of the format, with a final concatenation. It might be slower but the code would be clearer.
As it is:
formatrows = arrayfun(...
@(w, t) sprintf('%%%d%s', w, t{1}), ...
colFormatWidth, colFormatType, 'UniformOutput', false);
formatrow = [formatrows{:}]
