HSSF

Alternatives

Maybe it's unwise to advertise your competitors but we believe competition is good and we have the best support reading and write Excel workbooks currently available.

Product  URL  Description 
JSC  jsc.tomschuetz.com   Reading, calculating standard and VBA functions with Java at runtime.  
Formula One  www.tidestone.com   An alternative to this project is to buy the $10,000 Formula 1 library and accept its crude api and limitations. 
Visual Basic  www.microsoft.com   Give up XML and write Visual Basic code on a Microsoft Windows based Environment or output in Microsoft's beta and primarily undocumented XML for office format. 
JExcel  http://stareyes.homeip.net:8888  Frequently unavailable. Little currently known about it's capabilities. 
JWorkbook  http://www.object-refinery.com/jworkbook/index.html  This effort supports Gnumeric and Excel, however the Excel part is done using POI anyway. 
xlReader  http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/xlrd  Provides decent support for reading Excel. 
Excel ODBC Driver  http://www.nwlink.com/~leewal/content/exceljavasample.htm  ODBC offers a somewhat wierd method for using Excel. 
ExtenXLS  http://www.extentech.com/products/ExtenXLS/docs/intro3.jsp  Commercial library for reading, modifying and writing Excel spreadsheets. Not cheap but certainly a lot more affordable than Formula 1. No idea as to it's quality. 
J-Integra Java-Excel Bridge  http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/bridging/jintegra.asp  Uses DCOM to an Excel instance on a windows machine. 
Perl & C  There are a number of perl and C libraries, however none of them are consistent. 
VistaJDBC  http://www.vistaportal.com/products/vistajdbc.htm  VistaJDBC driver works with both StarOffice and Excel spreadsheets and can access data using standard SQL statements without any API programming. VistaJDBC also implemented ability to choose by not just rows and columns but by specific cells, ranges of cells, etc.  
Coldtags Excel Tag Library  http://www.servletsuite.com/servlets/exceltag.htm  This library outputs a simple CSV file, in which cells can contain numbers or text. You could output a CSV file without its help, but it gives a little more readability/structure to the code, and could be extended to handle more complexity. When you invoke one of these JSP pages from your browser, you open up an Excel spreadsheet. There's no formatting, worksheets, or anything fancy like that. So it's not strictly a competitor but it does the job.  
by Glen Stampoultzis
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