Apache POI for Excel: Setting the cell type to “text” for an entire column

Question

I need to generate an .xls (Excel) file, using the Java library Apache POI for spreadsheets.

The file will contain a list of phone numbers in column A, formatted as \"02

Answer 1

A better way to set it now using POI is to use the BuiltinFormats class.

Eg:

To convert the column type to numeric

 CellStyle numericStyle = workbook.createCellStyle(); 
 numericStyle.setDataFormat(BuiltinFormats.getBuiltinFormat(2)); // 2 For Number 
 worksheet.setDefaultColumnStyle(colId, numericStyle);

The complete list of BuiltinFormats formats can be seen, here