Introduction to Apache POI For Manipulation of MS Office Documents with Java

In many software applications, reports are generated in Microsoft Excel format. Moreover, an application may receive an Excel file as input data. These Excel files are mainly used for accounting and stock information.

This is a very popular API, which is used to create, modify, and read Excel files using Java programs.

This library contains classes and methods to work with different types of documents like following

• POIFS (Poor Obfuscation Implementation File System) 
• HSSF (Horrible Spreadsheet Format)
• XSSF (XML Spreadsheet Format) 
• HPSF (Horrible Property Set Format) 
• HWPF (Horrible Word Processor Format) 
• XWPF (XML Word Processor Format) 
• HSLF (Horrible Slide Layout Format) 
• HDGF (Horrible DiaGram Format) 
• HPBF (Horrible PuBlisher Format) etc. 

---

Features of Apache POI

• It provides stream-based processing, hence it is useful for large files and takes less memory.
• It can handle both XLS and XLSX formats of spreadsheets.
• It contains HSSF implementation to support old file formats like Excel (97-2007).
• The HSSF library and XSSF API provide mechanisms to read, write or modify excel spreadsheets.
• It also provides SXSSF which is an extension of XSSF to work with very large excel sheets.
• It provides support for additional excel features such as working with Formulas, creating cell styles by filling colors and borders, fonts, headers and footers, data validations, images, hyperlinks, etc.

---

Dependency Files

You can download the following dependencies for working with excel files.

1. dom4j-1.6.1.jar
2. poi-3.9-20121203.jar
3. poi-ooxml-3.9-20121203.jar
4. poi-ooxml-schemas-3.9-20121203.jar
5. xmlbeans-2.3.0.jar

---

You can download the following dependencies for working with doc files.

1. commons-codec-1.9.jar
2. poi-3.12.jar
3. poi-ooxml-3.17.jar
4. poi-scratchpad-3.12.jar

---

You can download the following dependencies for working with power point files.

1. activation-1.1.1.jar
2. commons-codec-1.11.jar
3. commons-collections4-4.2.jar
4. commons-logging-1.2.jar
5. commons-math3-3.6.1.jar
6. curvesapi-1.05.jar
7. jaxb-api-2.3.0.jar
8. jaxb-core-2.3.0.1.jar
9. jaxb-impl-2.3.0.1.jar
10. junit-4.12.jar
11. log4j-1.2.17.jar
12. poi-4.0.0.jar
13. poi-examples-4.0.0.jar
14. poi-excelant-4.0.0.jar
15. poi-ooxml-4.0.0.jar
16. poi-ooxml-schemas-4.0.0.jar
17. poi-scratchpad-4.0.0.jar
18. xmlbeans-3.0.1.jar

---

Let us start learning how we can read from the MS Excel documents with the help of Java programs using Apache POI

Happy Exploring!