Easiest way to compare two Excel files in Java?

Question

I\'m writing a JUnit test for some code that produces an Excel file (which is binary). I have another Excel file that contains my expected output. What\'s the easiest way to com

Answer 1

I needed to do something similar and was already using the Apache POI library in my project to create Excel files. So I opted to use the included ExcelExtractor interface to export both workbooks as a string of text and asserted that the strings were equal. There are implementations for both HSSF for .xls as well as XSSF for .xlsx.

Dump to string:

XSSFWorkbook xssfWorkbookA = ...;
String workbookA = new XSSFExcelExtractor(xssfWorkbookA).getText();

ExcelExtractor has some options for what all should be included in the string dump. I found it to have useful defaults of including sheet names. In addition it includes the text contents of the cells.