Excel documents handling

[Konrad Billewicz]

Hi,

I need to read, modify and save large and compilcated Excel documents using
Java. I tried to use POI and JExcelApi but both of them are handling my
documents wrong (along with throwing exceptions / warnings) and SoftArtisans
OfficeWriter which works very good but is too expensive for my company (at
least $1800). Could you recomend other, OS or quite cheap software worth
using?

Best regards,
Konrad Billewicz

 

[Paul Cager]

Hi,

I need to read, modify and save large and compilcated Excel documents using
Java. I tried to use POI and JExcelApi but both of them are handling my
documents wrong (along with throwing exceptions / warnings) and SoftArtisans
OfficeWriter which works very good but is too expensive for my company (at
least $1800). Could you recomend other, OS or quite cheap software worth
using?

Best regards,
Konrad Billewicz

If your Java program is running on a Windows machine with Excel
installed, then you can use a Java / COM bridge to drive Excel's object
model directly.

IBM's Bridge2Java (also known as "Interface Tool") can access many
Windows COM objects, including Excel.

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/bridge2java

 

[Konrad Billewicz]

If your Java program is running on a Windows machine with Excel

installed, then you can use a Java / COM bridge to drive Excel's object
model directly.

We are considering this solution but the project is under development and it
would be quite difficult to integrate. Have you any other ideas?

Best regards,
Konrad Billewicz

 

[TechBookReport]

Hi,

I need to read, modify and save large and compilcated Excel documents using
Java. I tried to use POI and JExcelApi but both of them are handling my
documents wrong (along with throwing exceptions / warnings) and SoftArtisans
OfficeWriter which works very good but is too expensive for my company (at
least $1800). Could you recomend other, OS or quite cheap software worth
using?

Best regards,
Konrad Billewicz

Have you tried JACOB (Java COM Bridge)? Open source. Take a look at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jacob-project/

 

[Roedy Green]

We are considering this solution but the project is under development and it
would be quite difficult to integrate. Have you any other ideas?

one other sort of bridge is the keystroke bridge where the Java
program types and the keystrokes are fed via JNI into Excel or some
other windows program. It is typing blind.

There of course there are CSV files which have just data but no
formulae. These are easy to create and read in java. See
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/csv.html

I worked on a Java spreadsheet engine that could import and export
Excel files. Unfortunately the company went belly up.
I did the JavaDoc for it. We must have got the Excel format docs
somewhere to write it.

 

[Paul Cager]

We are considering this solution but the project is under development and it
would be quite difficult to integrate. Have you any other ideas?

Best regards,
Konrad Billewicz

I guess it depends what is going wrong with the POI approach - is it
something like bad formatting? It might help to move as much processing
as possible into an Excel VBA macro, and use POI or Bridge2Java to
drive the macros. Horrible bodge, I know, but it might work.

Paul