Hi Jeff,

I am wokring on an article about this. I'm using the real ting (Microsoft
Excel 2003).

You may read the draft.
http://home.no.net/larsinge/MVP/

The article:
http://home.no.net/larsinge/MVP/An%20introduction%20on%20how%20to%20control%20Ex
cel%202003%20with%20J.pdf

The Visual Studio 2003 J# project:
http://home.no.net/larsinge/MVP/J_Excel_Article_DraftSept04.zip

Regards,
Lars-Inge T?nnessen

There are some third party libraries that read and write Excel files without
going through Excel automation (so you can deploy your app on PCs that don't
have Excel). Take a look at http://www.syncfusion.com/Products/excelrw.aspx 
for example.

Bruno.

Hi Jeff,

To generate Excel and Word in .NET or Java you can use SoftArtisans OfficeWriter:

http://officewriter.softartisans.com

-Chris

Hi Jeff,

Very timely post. I have just today grabbed all of the POI stuff and am
trying to port it to J#. I've run across an issue, perhaps we can help each
other out. I'm more comfortable with C++ and VB.net, and deciced to use J#
just to minimize porting hassles, but its not my strength.

First, to the others in this topic, Automation is not desirable when you
want a general purpose utility that may run in the background. Automation is
explicitly described as dangerous outside of desktop interactive situations.
Unfortunatley you have to get down and dirty and write OLE 2.0 container
files. I had hoped that there would be .NET OLE 2.0 calls but could not find
them.

The POI stuff seems, so far, to be marvelous to work with.

I actually got the POI file system code ported to J# in about 2 hours. I was
impressed, never having written a J# program before.

After porting I called their test routine, which read in and wrote out the
file, and it worked! Excel read the output file with no errors. The only
change i had to make was to convert calls to Java.Arrays functions not
supported by J#, which was a snap.

Next I moved on to HSSF, which implements the Excel file format (within the
POI)

I'm running into problems with the java.Stack type. The POI code uses the
Stack type and then wants to access those variables as a list (ie. calling
'get', not 'pop'), and Visual Studio is complaing about this. It doesn't
like the java.Stack data type.

I'd be happy to send you the J# project as i have it now if you have J#
expertise and would be willing to share the results.

John Mott
VP Software Development
CRE Technologies
johnmott@comcast.net