Calling Excel from Java

[Ben]

Hi all,

I am not sure if I am posting this in the right NG, sorry, if I am not.
My question involves trying to call Excel from Java, in much the same
way, VB can create an instance of Excel thru COM and take control of
that instance of Excel. Is there such a way in Java? Thanks for
sharing your thoughts.

Ben

 

[Wibble]

Hi all,

I am not sure if I am posting this in the right NG, sorry, if I am not.
My question involves trying to call Excel from Java, in much the same
way, VB can create an instance of Excel thru COM and take control of
that instance of Excel. Is there such a way in Java? Thanks for
sharing your thoughts.

Ben

Try http://sourceforge.net/projects/jacob-project/

 

[Ben]

Thanks Wibble.

Ben

 

[Robert kebernet Cooper]

I have had good luck in the past using the IBM Java-COM Bridge
(http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/dtjcb?open&S_TACT=104AHW61&S_CMP=GR&ca=dgr-jw26awdtjcb)
to work with MapPoint. I would also recommend checking out
https://com4j.dev.java.net/ In terms of raw elegance, it is far and
away the best Java-COM layer I have seen yet. While I have played with
it, I cannot, however, vouch for it on an actual production project.

 

[AWieminer]

I am not sure if I am posting this in the right NG, sorry, if I am not.
Try POI library if you need a pure java support. Ive used it for simple
xls "report" datasheets and works perfect. I have not tried any chart
generations or pivot table things, probably its an area where not
everything works.
http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/index.html

 

[E.Otter]

A commercial alternative to POI is produced by SoftArtisans
www.softartisans.com. Unlike POI which has reversed engineered the Excel
file format, SoftArtisans licensed the Word and Excel file formats from
Microsoft. Almost anything you can do in Excel you can do with SoftArtisans
OfficeWriter, including charts and pivot tables. It is pure Java.

I just finished working on a project to replace reports generated by a
normal report-generation tool with the SoftArtisans OfficeWriter
document-generator tool. It is for a mission critical and revenue critical
system at a fortune 100, NYSE listed company. Our end users generated
15,000+ Excel and Word documents in the final 10 days of our last fiscal
quarter. All of them created by SoftArtisan's Java OfficeWriter product and
only 1 SoftArtisan specific bug was discovered. It affected a very small
number of users. Softartisan's worked with us to isolate the issue and
provided a workaround for both our endusers and for our next production
release.

Their Java OfficeWriter product is still maturing so it did have some bugs
found in development we had to workaround and some of the API's can use
polishing. The support is truly excellent. They really, really worked hard
to help when we ran into development problems. It doesn't have report
generator type features like data grouping, but with work you can emulate
that and SoftArtisans is working very hard to add those features in the
future.

Big time thumbs up!