Introduction to Apache POI

In many software applications, reports are generated in Microsoft Excel format. Moreover, an application may receive 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, 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 provides mechanisms to read, write or modify excel spreadsheets.
• It also provides SXSSF that 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

Happy Exploring!