Having just recently evaluated it, I can report that it no longer has those limitations. You can create a workbook from scratch and set arbitrary cells in it, even without placeholders.
However, their documentation says you still have to use templates! It is apparently way out of date. One thing I liked about it was that you could refer to cells the same way you refer to them in Excel, e.g. "B12". I didn't see that you could do that in POI, but I could be wrong. I think you have to get row 11 and then get cell 1 from the row. That would be a nice addition to POI if I am right that it can't currently do it. (But I'd like to also still have the numeric row and column and indices because that's a simpler way handle iterative processing.) Overall, though, I thought the POI API was more logical and more functional. Although you can create workbooks from scratch in ExtenXLS now, you can't do much in the way of formatting them. The license says I can't publish any benchmarks (so I won't), but scalability is the major reason we are sticking with POI. (Along with source availability, of course.) > -----Original Message----- > From: Nicholson, Dale [mailto:DNicholson@;APACMail.com] > Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2002 2:14 PM > To: 'POI Users List' > Subject: RE: ExtenXLS Feature Matrix - compares to POI > > > I tried to use ExtenXLS before I discovered POI. The first > thing I noticed (which ruled out it's use for me) was that it > depends on template documents created in Excel; you cannot > create workbooks from scratch. You have to know exactly what > rows and so forth you need beforehand and have placeholders > in cells for anything you want to change at runtime. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:poi-user-unsubscribe@;jakarta.apache.org> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:poi-user-help@;jakarta.apache.org>
