On Fri, 18 Oct 2002 17:53:46 +0000, Dennis Doubleday wrote: > 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. >
Thats good. Thanks for the report! This is helpful! > However, their documentation says you still have to use templates! It is > apparently way out of date. > Ahh... I'm a decent programmer....but I'm a really STUPID user... hence why I coudln't figure it out :-) > 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.) > I'm cool with this going in the contrib convenience functions if someone thinks its worthwhile. I don't want to put it in the core until after 2.0. Convienince functions in the core would lead to bloat and can increase exponentially the amount of code to maintain and having 3 ways of doing things leads people to ask "which is the best way" which they may erroneously assume the B13 is efficient...when in truth it has to be translated because it doesn't actually exist in the file... So after the 2.0 featureset is realized we'll be more able to handle this kind of thing in the core because...well there won't be too much in the way of MAJOR features to develop....so I'll have more time to do those. You currently kinda can but its not "easier" (use: http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/javadocs/org/apache/poi/hssf/util/CellReference.html or http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/javadocs/org/apache/poi/hssf/util/RangeAddress.html) ... There are two because to be honest I don't like the RangeAddress code (maybe get26Sys means 1,1 -> B2 to someone but it doesn't to me) and it is devoid of Javadoc. I will probably deprecate it and put all its functionality into CellReference eventually, and refactor Named Ranges to use it. (my dislike is largely its lack of compliance with: http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/resolutions/res001.html) > 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. > Thanks! :-) > 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.) > I practically never use software that prohibits me from publishing benchmarks as I'm just flat out afraid to use something that has such poor performance that they are afraid of their competitors. i think free speech should extend to this. I'm adding that crusade to my todo list. Well to note they have a few other misnomers on their comparison. Commercial support is available for POI through both SuperLink Software and Rainer-Klute IT Consulting (I assume). And OEM licensing will of course be available for SOA Workbook, but its totally not applicable to POI duhh... I consider NOT having to do OEM licensing a bonus FEATURE not a missing feature! ;-) Scalability will continue to improve. Shortly after 2.0 we'll have a major internal refactoring that will reduce memory consumption to generally 1/4th of its current footprint (depending on whats in the workbook of course) and generally half the time it takes to create large workbooks. Thanks again, Andy >> -----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>
