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Showing posts from September, 2013

Using Apache POI to create MS Office documents

A question was posted on LinkedIn which caused me to get out of my shell and post again. After all, I know all too well how frustrating it is to try to get something to work and not being able to find any meaningful examples on the web (YES... we have all grown fond of Google to find examples and get lazy researching topics, but that's life...) I decided to post some simple examples on how to create MS Word documents from scratch. This is all based on my postings on LinkedIn on this very topic. To read the thread, you may go  here . First question : What is Apache POI? In simple terms, this is an free, open-source software (FOSS) that provide an application interface for Microsoft documents. This product was created by the Apache Foundation POI team. My examples are based on version 3.8. The latest version is 3.9 and there is a beta 3.10 available. Second question : What kind of Microsoft documents? Simply, MS Office documents (i.e. Word, Excel, Power