The Office methods are methods in COM objects and can be called from any language that supports COM. As we all know, Sun is/was not
very fond of the COM support MS offered in their Java implementation, so Sun does not support it.

You can get this COM (bridge) support from an other third parts like http://www.intrinsyc.com/ for the Sun Java.

http://j-integra.intrinsyc.com/

With J-Integra the COM objects appears as normal Java objects.

There is a second bridge:
http://www.jnbridge.com/

However these brides have a serious price tag if this is for personal home enthusiast usage. I think they offer free trail versions.

I have called .net from Java over RMI - SOAP - Remoring.net calls, using the free Axis Apache xml webservice api (wsdl)
http://ws.apache.org/axis/ . The downside is that this is veeeery slooooow, and it does only support a few primitives like int,
double, string etc, and you have to read and modify the generated java code.

A C++ call is probably what you should be looking more at.

A google search on "Automating MS-Office applications" gives us lots of hits. If you know C++ here is a power point  example :

http://www.codeproject.com/com/ole_automation.asp

Regards,
Lars-Inge T?nnessen
www.larsinge.com

with J#, you can use the Microsoft Office COM interfaces (for free), since
.NET can call into COM. Don't need to use VS.net, can use the command line
compiler too

plus there is a special VS.net addon package for Office (what used to be the
Office Professional now is an add-on for Visual Studio.net if I've got it
well). That should have some extra useful docs among other things