HSSF and XSSF Examples

Apache POI comes with a number of examples that demonstrate how you can use the POI API to create documents from "real life". The examples below based on common XSSF-HSSF interfaces so that you can generate either *.xls or *.xlsx output just by setting a command-line argument:

BusinessPlan -xls

  or

BusinessPlan -xlsx

All sample source is available in SVN

In addition, there are a handful of HSSF only and XSSF only examples as well.

Available Examples

The following examples are available:

Common HSSF and XSSF
HSSF-Only
XSSF-Only

Business Plan

The BusinessPlan application creates a sample business plan with three phases, weekly iterations and time highlighting. Demonstrates advanced cell formatting (number and date formats, alignments, fills, borders) and various settings for organizing data in a sheet (freezed panes, grouped rows).

business plan demo

Calendar

The Calendar demo creates a multi sheet calendar. Each month is on a separate sheet.

Loan Calculator

The LoanCalculator demo creates a simple loan calculator. Demonstrates advance usage of cell formulas and named ranges.

loan calculator demo

Timesheet

The Timesheet demo creates a weekly timesheet with automatic calculation of total hours. Demonstrates advance usage of cell formulas.

timesheet demo

Conditional Formats

The ConditionalFormats demo is a collection of short examples showing what you can do with Excel conditional formatting in POI:

Highlight cells based on their values
Highlight a range of cells based on a formula
Hide errors
Hide the duplicate values
Highlight duplicate entries in a column
Highlight items that are in a list on the worksheet
Highlight payments that are due in the next thirty days
Shade alternating rows on the worksheet
Shade bands of rows on the worksheet

Formula Examples

The CalculateMortgage example demonstrates a simple user-defined function to calculate principal and interest.

The CheckFunctionsSupported example shows how to test what functions and formulas aren't supported from a given file.

The SettingExternalFunction example demonstrates how to use externally provided (third-party) formula add-ins.

The UserDefinedFunctionExample example demonstrates how to invoke a User Defined Function for a given Workbook instance using POI's UDFFinder implementation.

Add Dimensioned Image

The AddDimensionedImage example demonstrates how to add an image to a worksheet and set that images size to a specific number of millimetres irrespective of the width of the columns or height of the rows.

Aligned Cells

The AligningCells example demonstrates how various alignment options work.

Cell Style Details

The CellStyleDetails example demonstrates how to read excel styles for cells.

Linked Dropdown Lists

The LinkedDropDownLists example demonstrates one technique that may be used to create linked or dependent drop down lists.

Common SS Performance Test

The SSPerformanceTest example provides a way to create simple example files of varying sizes, and to calculate how long they take. Useful for benchmarking your system, and to also test if slow performance is due to Apache POI itself or to your own code.

ToHtml

The ToHtml example shows how to display a spreadsheet in HTML using the classes for spreadsheet display.

ToCSV

The ToCSV example demonstrates one way to convert an Excel spreadsheet into a CSV file.

All the HSSF-only examples can be found in SVN

All the XSSF-only examples can be found in SVN