Generating excel documents programmatically

Question

Has anyone used a Java based library for generating excel documents? Preferably support for 2003?

Answer 1

I do it with Jacob as a general java and COM solution. However in my reading Jacob does not handle pretty well multiple calls (say millions of calls) and I needed to patch it a bit. These patches were not accepted by Jacob maintainer.

Anyway Jacob is open source (LGPL) and after patching it I have a production environment running for years yet.

After connecting to Excel with COM, you use standard Excel api to process documents. First you try how it works with VBS (VBScript Language Reference), then implement in java.

Answer 2

A formatted HTML table will import correctly, but it would be better to use the Excel XML format from the Excel 2003 XML Toolbox for more advanced needs (multiple worksheets, formulas, etc).