Apache POI 3.8 released

The developers of Apache POI, the Java library for reading and writing Microsoft Office file formats, have announced that the library has been updated to version 3.8. The new release is a incremental feature update that includes improvements to allow working with a low memory footprint, brings better spreadsheet evaluation and adds an API for accessing PowerPoint 2007 OOXML files.

For low memory scenarios, the developers have introduced NPOIFS, a new NIO driven API for reading OLE2 filesystems and SXSSF, a low-memory API for very large spreadsheets. More Excel formulas are now supported including IRR, NPV, MROUND, VAR, VARP, CLEAN, CHAR and ADDRESS, as well as various time and date functions. XSLF, POI's implementation of .xlsx, the PowerPoint 2007 OOXML file format, includes an API which allows presentations to be created, existing presentations to be modified with new slides, slides reordered, deleted or resized, and hyperlinks, text and images read or manipulated. XSLF also includes PPTX2PNG for converting PPTX slideshows into PNG files.

Other enhancements include improvements in reading .doc files, with added support for reading footnotes, end notes and bookmarks, first support for charts in the XSSF spreadsheet component and support for encrypted OOXML documents. The full details of the changes in this release and in the preceding beta releases are provided in the change log. Apache POI 3.8 is available to download in binary or source forms, and is licensed under the Apache 2.0 licence.

(djwm)