Hi, I'm new to the subject of generating xls and ppt files from java. I've pent a few hours trying to find out what solutions exist. It seems like POI is the best solution to what I need. Let me explain shortly my business use case. I have standalone java app that provide a user with some reporting capabilities. Once the user is presented with the data in the table in my app, a user can decide to export the data as a chart of chosen type(bar, pie etc.) to a PowerPoint file. The user needs to have their own ppt template file and be able to click on the chart in PowerPoint and choose "edit chart data in excel" (or something like that) - otherwise I could just use jfreechart and embed a drawing in ppt.
The general documentation says that charting is not yet implemented. In other place I found that "named ranges" provide some workaround but I'm not sure if it would work in my case (possible infinite numbers of various reports). If I have to specify what cells contain data what if a report is to have 1000 more rows than I specified earlier? And now the main question :) I found on the emailing list that there are no plans to implement charting unless Microsoft releases the Office binary formats ( http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/poi-user/200802.mbox/ajax/[EMAIL PROTECTED]). It happened In February ( http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/OfficeBinaryFormats.mspx). I can see in the scratchpad part of svn that there is some work going on . http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/poi/trunk/src/scratchpad/src/org/apache/poi/hssf/usermodel/HSSFChart.javais in usermodel package so am I right that it's going to provide high level API to export "real" charts to ppt that would further be editable in excel? I'm aware that the project is not sponsored but can you tell whether there are already any plans on the date when the initial charts impl will be complete? Thanks for any tips, Maciek
