DZone

We use Office applications frequently to serve many purposes. Have you ever thought of doing the task of reading or writing an Office file (like Excel spreadsheet) programmatically? Sometimes, there will be situations where we will have to handle it by writing some custom program. The Apache POI library is a very helpful tool to accomplish such a task. The POI library can be used for reading or writing all kinds of Office documents. This article, however, will focus on working with spreadsheet files — more specifically, Excel files.

Excel File Formats

Microsoft Excel has two major file formats:

Source: DZone