Tuesday 21 February 2012

Java APIs for MS Office

Hello All,

Every now and then we always have to go through with this. We always have to do something programmatically with MS office documents, spreadsheet, power point etc.

Of course there are loads of such things exist to produce (extract) stuff in excel and pdf based format. However I had to travel an extra mile to produce an MS excel 2010 based report with loads of formatting, headings, legends etc. So I was forced to use something which can literally play with internals of such not so open formats.

Like I said in my previous post that Goggle is your best friend and I came across such a lovely Apache project for playing with such artifacts.

Apache POI is the one which best suited to me for various reasons apart from that it had everything I needed. It is so simple to use that I was able to kick start things in a matter of minutes. It offers many things but the one of my interest was POI-HSSF and POI-XSSF (for 2007 and 2010 based excel spreadsheets respectively)

There are so many Quick Guide references that you don't necessarily need to go through the whole documentation. I haven't used all of it as it was not needed for me but the offering is vast that it would meet all your needs.

I recommend to give it a try and produce something simple to start with.

Cheers,
Namish



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