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How to manage excel sheets in excel file using java without using 3rd party libraries

I has a excel file with 4 excel sheets in it. Now i want to read or write to required excel sheets using java without using any third party lib.
I know i can read and write data using FileInputStream and FileOutputStream respecitvely. But i can handle the work sheets??

No, you can'not, There is numerous way in Java for reading/writing files, but there is no built-in support for MS Office/Excel spreadsheets. http://poi.apache.org/ - is a key to victory.

If your goal is to interface with data from an excel sheet from your Java application, I'd suggest to use the solutions suggested by other posters, it will save you a lot of work.
If, however, you want to be able to read excel files from Java (or any other programming language for that matter) 'just because you can' then you could take a look at this file and read the instructions on this web-page. I would warn you that it would take considerably more time to implement your own API if you base it only on the file-specs that are publicly available. You might want to check out the work done by the people from the Apache POI project to get an idea of how to approach it. Or (even better) contribute to the project. Here you can find out how to go about doing that

Native Java document parser and converter library / linux based document converters

I'm looking for a Java library which can do the following:
parse emails in *.eml or *.msg format for attachments of type DOC,DOCX,JPEG,PNG,GIF,TXT,XLS,XLSX,PPT,PDF and convert the attachmens to the TIFF format.
It can be either open source or a comercial library. Alternatively I'm looking for command line tools for linux doing this. We already tried open office, but there are too many problems with some document formats.
UPDATE:
What I found out by research up to now:
For parsing emails and extracting attachments, JavaMail (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javamail/index.html) is a good choice.
For converting documents, JodConverter (http://code.google.com/p/jodconverter/) is a confortable library. However it's only a wrapper for open office, so if there are issues with open office (and I do have often trouble with openoffice) to convert a document, you will have them also with JodConcerter.
In conclusion I had no luck (up to now) to find any document conversion library implemented in native java, which handels all common document formats, neither open source or even commercial. It seems to be a real market gap.

RainbowPDF may fit: its a commercial server based conversion tool with Java API.
If you've got a Windows server, have a look at NEEVIA Document Converter Pro. It has some mail functionality.
Apace POI is an interface to read the content of Microsoft Office documents. You will have to code the image generating and layouting components on your own. Nervertheless it reads Outlook MSG format.

Apache POI - the Java API for Microsoft Documents. However I don't know how to easily convert parsed document to TIFF.

May be a mix of different approaches could be useful? Depending on your requirements, could be possible to use several libraries to convert all the formats you need to manage: Microsoft Office, Adobe PDF, some different image formats and simple text files.
I mean, you can create a process that, depending on the type of the file extracted (using Java Mail), you could recognize what kind of format the file has and continue processing with the right conversion mechanism using the suitable library. Then you will idenfity if a file it's an image to convert, try Java Advanced Imaging, if it's a Microsoft Office file, try Apache POI and so on. For managing PDF files, you can try Apache PDFBox it's another good and opensource solution.
By the way, if you are looking not only for a Java approach, may be this thread may help you.
I don't know if there are better commercial solutions than #ChrisGer commented.

Do not waste your time looking at Apache POI, as it can only parse the content of the Office files but is not suitable for rendering it.
Since there are OpenOffice servers available, I suggest you do this. I also know you can easily use DCOM to talk with Microsoft Office apps, maybe a Java->DCOM bridge is more up to the task. However, this is not even recommended by Microsoft (so I suppose the JodConverter thing is equally unstable).

Determine installed Microsoft Excel version using Apache POI?

I need to determine which version of Microsoft Excel is installed on a Windows PC. I'm working with Apache POI but can't figure out an easy way to do this.
Anyone know if Apache POI has a built in functionality to do this? Any ideas how to do this using Java code?

POI provides a mechanism for writing Excel documents without using any of the Excel APIs. I doubt it has a mechanism to detect the installed version, as it has no dependency on an installed version of Excel.
Following a pattern similar to the one described in this question about detecting the Excel version in .NET, you could use JACOB to detect the installed Excel version like so:
ActiveXComponent xl = new ActiveXComponent("Excel.Application");
try {
xl.getProperty("Version");
} finally {
xl.invoke("Quit", new Variant[] {});
}

I really, really don't think POI has this functionality, as it's explicitly written to work cross-platform. It only deals with document files.
If I were faced with this task, I'd dig into the registry (via the Windows API) for the association of the .XLS file type. That will, err should give you a link to the most recently and completely installed Excel. Not reliably, because
there might not be an Excel installed;
the user might have changed the association; or
the Excel pointed at by the association might be broken.
But given the hint of (usually) the applicable executable, you could then examine either the .EXE file header of Excel or perhaps something in the surrounding files to determine Excel's version.

Ok it just occured to me that older Microsoft Excel versions have file extensions .xls and new ones have .xlsx.
I can just get reference to the file and get the file extensions... that easy.
If anyone has a better solution please let me know.

Is there any way to get a WordprocessingML Clipboard content in java?

I've got a customer who managed it to paste WordprocessingML content into our application. As far as I know it was a direct copy&paste from Word 2000 to our Java application. I tried every Word and Java Version combination, but I can't reproduce this behavior - especially, since our application filters for HTML and text/plain.
I'm pretty sure that the older Office version had there own clipboards and exported only the formats, which should be available to other programms. Every office version I know(except maybe 2007) exports HTML, RTF and Plain.
Is there any way to get a WordprocesingML content into the clipboard and maybe to get Java to mix-up the data flavours

Apache POI is a Java API To Access Microsoft Format Files. HWPF is its part for reading and writing MS Word files. Apache TIKA is a toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and structured text content from various documents using existing parser libraries. It also gives some support for MS Word documents. I suggest you see if they fit your use case.

How can I read MS Office files in a server without installing MS Office and without using the Interop Library?

The interop library is slow and needs MS Office installed.
Many times you don't want to install MS Office on servers.
I'd like to use Apache POI, but I'm on .NET.
I need only to extract the text portion of the files, not creating nor "storing information" in Office files.
I need to tell you that I've got a very large document library, and I can't convert it to newer XML files.
I don't want to write a parser for the binaries files.
A library like Apache POI does this for us. Unfortunately, it is only for the Java platform. Maybe I should consider writing this application in Java.
I am still not finding an open source alternative to POI in .NET, I think I'll write my own application in Java.

For all MS Office versions:
You could use the third-party components like TX Text Controls for Word and TMS Flexcel Studio for Excel
For the new Office (2007):
You could do some basic stuff using .net functionality from system.io.packaging. See how at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332058.aspx
For the old Office (before 2007):
The old Office formats are now documented: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/officebinaryformats.mspx. If you want to do something really easy you might consider trying it. But be aware that these formats are VERY complex.

Check out the Aspose components. They are designed to mimic the Interop functionality without requiring a full Office install on a server.

As the new docx formats are inherently XML based files, you can create and manipulate them programmatically with standard XML DOM techniques, once you know the structure.
The files are basically zip archives with an alternate file extension. Use the System.IO.Packaging namespace to get access to the internal elements of the file, then open them into a XmlDocument to perform the manipulation.
There are examples available for doing this, and the Office Open XML project on SourceForge may be worth looking at for inspiration.
As for the older binary formats, these were proprietary to MS, and the only way you're likely to get at the content from within is through the Office object model (requires an Office install), or a third party file converter/parser.
Unfortunately there's nothing first party and native to the .NET platform to work with these files.

What do you need to do with those file? If you just want to stream them to the user, then the basic file streams are fine. If you want to create new files (perhaps based on a template) to send to the user that the user can open in Office, there are a variety or work-arounds.
If you're actually keeping data in Office documents for use by your web site, you're doing it wrong. Office documents, even Excel spreadsheets and access databases, are not really an appropriate choice for use with an interactive web site.

If the document is in word 2007 format, you can use the system.io.packaging library to interact with it programatically.
RWendi

In Java world, there is also JExcelApi. It is very clearly written, from what I was able to see, much cleaner then POI. So maybe even a port of that code to .NET is not out of the question, depending of course you have enough of time on your hands.

OpenOffice.
You can program against it and have it do a lot for you, without spending the money on a license for the server, or have the vulnerability associated with it on your server.

Microsoft Excel workbooks can be read using an ODBC driver (or is it an OLE DB driver? can't remember) that makes the workbook look like a database table. But I don't know whether that driver is available without the Office Suite itself.

You can use OpenOffice. It has a command-line conversion tool:
Conversion Howto
In short, you define a macro in OpenOffice and you call that macro with a command-line
argument to OpenOffice. In that argument the name of the local file (the Office file) is
encoded.
It's not a great sollution, but it should be workable.