Question

I want to use Apache POI library to parse excel files (old versions and newer versions of excel). So I was wondering what jars do i need to include from the Apache POI because in following link:

http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.poi

I found lots of jars to be included, do I need to include them all?

If so, what is the latest stable version to be included, and does it work with Microsoft’s Office 2010?

Answer 1

No, you don’t have to include all of POI‘s dependencies. Maven’s transitive dependency mechanism will take care of that. As noted you just have to express a dependency on the appropriate POI artifact. For example:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.poi</groupId>
    <artifactId>poi-ooxml</artifactId>
    <version>3.8-beta4</version>
</dependency>

Edit(UPDATE): I don’t know about previous versions but to resolve imports to XSSFWorkbook and other classes in org.apache.poi package you need to add dependency for poi-ooxml too. The dependencies will be:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.poi</groupId>
    <artifactId>poi</artifactId>
    <version>4.1.2</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.poi</groupId>
    <artifactId>poi-ooxml</artifactId>
    <version>4.1.2</version>
</dependency>