Apache POI - the Java API for Microsoft Documents

The Apache POI Project's mission is to create and maintain Java APIs for manipulating various file formats based upon the Office Open XML standards (OOXML) and Microsoft's OLE 2 Compound Document format (OLE2). In short, you can read and write MS Excel files using Java. In addition, you can read and write MS Word and MS PowerPoint files using Java. Apache POI is your Java Excel solution (for Excel 97-2008). We have a complete API for porting other OOXML and OLE2 formats and welcome others to participate.

OLE2 files include most Microsoft Office files such as XLS, DOC, and PPT as well as MFC serialization API based file formats. The project provides APIs for the and OLE2 Document Properties (HPSF).

Office OpenXML Format is the new standards based XML file format found in Microsoft Office 2007 and 2008. This includes XLSX, DOCX and PPTX. The project provides a low level API to support the Open Packaging Conventions using .

For each MS Office application there exists a component module that attempts to provide a common high level Java api to both OLE2 and OOXML document formats. This is most developed for . Work is progressing for Word documents (HWPF+XWPF) and .

The project has recently added support for . Microsoft opened the specifications to this format in October 2007. We would welcome contributions.

There are also projects for and .

As a general policy we collaborate as much as possible with other projects to provide this functionality. Examples include: for which there are serializers for HSSF; with whom we collaborate in documenting the XLS format; and for which we provide format interpretors. When practical, we donate components directly to those projects for POI-enabling them.