I’ve recently have to do some Excel integration with Java.
It was a very interesting challenge, I had to play around with COM and Dispatch stuff, things I have never touched before from a pure Java world.
After some investigation with the different libraries available, I’ve decided to try it Jacob. One of my requirements was to be able to read the data from Excel’s spreadsheet in memory, these data could have been altered constantly from external sources without been saved to to file system.
Using Jacob I was able to read all the workbook’s title, worksheets within the workbook, and the cells and their data all in memory. Basically anything functions from the Visual Basic editor within Excel was available from the Jacob’s API.