It is possible to obtain a list of all of the merged ranges of cells in the sheet. I have never done this in practice but I think that you will need to call the getNumMergedRegions() method on the sheet to recover an int value indicating the number of merged regions and then use a for loop to iterate through calling the getMergedRegionAt() method to recover a Region object that identifies - amongst other things - the co-ordinates of the cells at the top left hand and bottom right hand corners of the cell.
Knowing the locations and sizes of all of the merged regions, you could write a simple method to iterate through the cells contained within each merged range and simply check to see if any bar the top left hand cell contains a value. Best I can think of at this time in the morning. "Karr, David" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I just discovered a curious anomaly in a large spreadsheet I'm parsing with POI. I discovered that there is at least one merged region (1 row, 2 columns) that shows a particular value when I view it in Excel, but I discovered that there is hidden data "under" the merged region in the second cell in the merged region. If I use POI to just iterate through all the rows and columns, retrieving the cell data, it shows the value that I can see in the merged region (from the first column cell), but also the value from the second column cell. I can also see this in Excel if I select the entire second column, then "Copy", then paste into an external editor. It shows the hidden value. I need to figure out a way to detect this kind of condition with POI. If the cell is hidden like this, I want to ignore it. Can merged regions tell me this somehow? --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mailing List: http://jakarta.apache.org/site/mail2.html#poi The Apache Jakarta Poi Project: http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/ --------------------------------- TV dinner still cooling? Check out "Tonight's Picks" on Yahoo! TV.