Apache Jakarta and Beyond: A Java Programmer’s Introduction

Chapter 15. Creating Office Documents with POI

For good or ill, Microsoft office documents have become a de facto standard, especially in the business world. There are a number of free and open source editors that can read and write Word documents, and there are free and open source spreadsheet tools available that can similarly handle files in Excel format. None of these tools is quite complete, but many come fairly close. Of particular interest is OpenOffice from http://www.openoffice.org.

Although these tools can be very useful to end users who need to read or create Office documents, Office offers other important capabilities to programmers. Specifically, Office components can be controlled and queried through visual basic and other languages. ...