Comments on: Excel file generation made easy(er)

By: Mehran Emrani

Mehran Emrani — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:00:12 +0000

Luigi,
When Excel (2007) opens HTML files, it does its own formatting of columns, which in some cases, distorts values. Here are some examples:

001E00005 is changed into scientific notation: 1E 5
JAN09 is changed to 9-JAN
0123 is changed to 123

Do you know how to “tell” Excel not to do auto formatting when it opens an HTML file?

Thanks.

By: Malcolm

Malcolm — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:46:24 +0000

This is a good method but note Excel 2007 will show a warning when opening the file that the file is ‘not in the expected format’ if the user agress to open the file it will still open normally.

By: MSWord generation made easy(er) - NewInstance

MSWord generation made easy(er) - NewInstance — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:32:33 +0000

[...] But, Microsoft Word file format is not public, and generating such kind of file from Java is not that easy. There are libraries, like jakarta POI, but they are quite complex, and limited; and generating a print layout using those Java API could become a nightmare. The solution, as for the excel example, is to create a textual format from a word document, that can be easily manipulated: RTF. RTF, as msword, supports textfields that can be referenced by bookmarks and can be filled modifying the content of the file. [...]

By: Luigi

Luigi — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 10:48:43 +0000

Try downloading and deploying the demo webapp, and see yourself how easy it is. I would use POI if it is needed to import excel files, as POI is able also to read excel files. I found that reading excel is tricky also with POI, so better to not use excel at all for importing data.

By: Pedro

Pedro — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:19:47 +0000

I don’t try it yet, but i’ll try on my job… I do a single question? if it is so easy do this conversion why may I use POI???