Recently I worked on a project where one requirement was to basically generate some sort of spreadsheet to allow a person to view a large amount of data quickly and easily. Now, typically in the past, we’ve just written out a comma-delimited file (CSV) which Excel would then parse into the various columns it needed to. For what we needed, it was sufficient. With this new project, the prototype included a nicely formatted Excel spreadsheet, which the customer liked. This isn’t doable with your standard CSV file.
I employed the use of POI. It’s an API that allows you to generate Microsoft format documents, such as, Word and Excel documents. The API is very robust, and while it is still growing, it is very much usable.
I’ll post code tomorrow. Off to bed.