Apache POI Introduction

Apache POI (Poor Obfuscation Implementation) is a software project. which is design and developed by Apache Software Foundation. It is a collection of pure Java libraries and used to read and write Microsoft office documents such as Word, PowerPoint etc.

The objective of Apache POI is to design a cross-platform API which can manipulate various file formats of Microsoft Office and Open Office Documents.

It also supports OpenXML Format which is a new standards based XML file format found in Microsoft Office 2007 and 2008. It includes XLSX, DOCX and PPTX file formats.

It's latest and stable version is 3.17 which was released on September 15, 2017.

Supported Languages

We can use POI with any JVM based language that can import Java jar files. Scala, Groovy, Kotlin etc are the JVM based programming languages.

Apache POI Version History

Version	Released date
1.0.0	30. December 2001
1.0.1	4. January 2002
1.0.2	11. January 2002
1.1.0	4. January 2002
1.2.0	19. January 2002
1.5	6. May 2002
1.5.1	16. June 2002
2.0	26. January 2004
2.5	29. February 2004
2.5.1	29. February 2004
3.0	18. May 2007
3.0.1	5. July 2007
3.0.2	4. February 2008
3.1	29. June 2008
3.2	19. October 2008
3.5	28. September 2009
3.6	14. December 2009
3.7	29. October 2010
3.8	26. March 2012
3.9	3. December 2012
3.10	8. February 2014
3.10.1	18. August 2014
3.11	3.11
3.12	11. May 2015
3.13	29. September 2015
3.14	2. March 2016
3.15	21. September 2016
3.16	19. April 2017
3.17	15. September 2017