Jakarta POI 3.0 - Java API To Access Microsoft Office Format Files

Posted by James Kao on May 28, 2007

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Microsoft Office

Version 3.0 of the Jakarta POI, the venerable Java library that provides the ability to read and write certain Microsoft Office documents, has been released. This release adds support for MS Excel formulas, improved PowerPoint support, and image extraction for MS Word documents.

Users of POI deal with a number of sub-projects to handle various aspects of these formats:

POIFS

Access to file structure for MS Office documents

HSSF

MS Excel data access

HWPF

MS Word data access

HPSF

Properties attributes for Office documents

HSLF

PowerPoint data access

POI-Ruby

Ruby bindings to gcj compiled binary libraries

The programming paradigm is relatively simple. A developer will use POIFS to create/open the document as a stream, and then connect that to the appropriate data access API (HSSF, HWPF, or HSLF) to actually interact with the content. Angsuman Chakraborty has written a concise piece that goes into more detail about using POI to read Excel files that is a good introduction and quick start guide.

This marks the last release of POI under the Jakarta subproject before being promoted to a top-level Apache project.

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