Learning Apache POI for Java

Question

I'm trying to learn Apache POI for Java quickly (for manipulating Excel). I've been googling for tutorials, but so far all I've found is short, 2-paragraph explanations followed by a code sample. I wanted to find something a bit more comprehensive, that is concise but walks through it in a structured, complete, and understandable way. Anyone know of any good tutorials? Does Apache POI have any decent documentation...? I couldn't seem to find any on their site.

Answer 1

I found the documentation to be mostly lacking myself. I found the mailing group was my best resource for getting answers to my hard questions: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/poi-user/. For learning the basics I just followed the examples on the online documentation and used the trial and error approach with a simple console app.

Online documentation links:

http://poi.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/poi/xssf/usermodel/XSSFSheet.html

http://poi.apache.org/spreadsheet/quick-guide.html

Answer 2

I prefer Andy Khan's JExcel to POI. It's a better API, and the docs are very good.

Answer 3

There is EXCELENT tutorial on YouTube. Consists of 10 videos, I think. Just type in "Java programming tutorial - excel documents"

Answer 4

I'm a bit late to this party but another resource that hasn't been mentioned so far is the example code within POI's own source tree. I'm working with the Word functionality (HWPF) and found some nicely functioning code for using POI to do conversions to text, FO, and HTML. Following the source (which is unfortunately also not very commented) gave me a lot of useful hints.