Generate Dynamic Excel from Java

Question

We've pre-defined Excel document structure with lots of formulas and macros written.

During download of Excel, thru Java application we populate certain cells in Excel with data. After download when user open Excel, macros & formulas embedded in it will read the pre-populated data and behave accordingly.

We are rightnow using ExtenXLS to generate Dynamic Excel document from Java. Licence is CPU based and it doesn't support Boxes with Dual core CPU. We are forced to buy more Licence.

Is there any better tool we can look at it which is either free, product and support cost are minimal (Support is must), licence is simple.

Answer 1

I quite liked using the Apache POI Project HSSF library (http://poi.apache.org/) - it was fairly easy to use. I didn't use it in that much depth, but it seemed fairly powerful. Also, there's JExcelAPI (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jexcelapi/) which I've not used.

Answer 2

ODBC Connection?

Answer 3

If your users will have a recent version of Excel, it isn't too hard to tweak the XML file format by hand. Just save an existing document as XML, and find the places you want to replace.

Answer 4

I work on an open source project called XLLoop - this framework allows you to expose POJO functions as Excel functions.

So, instead of populating the excel sheet with data you could create a function that downloaded the data and have it populate in place.