The role of the POI jar package

Currently the latest release of POI is 3.10_final. This version of the jar package is protected by:

Maven Artifactid	Prerequisites	JAR
Poi	Commons-logging, Commons-codec, log4j	Poi-version-yyyymmdd.jar
Poi-scratchpad	Poi	Poi-scratchpad-version-yyyymmdd.jar
Poi-ooxml	POI, Poi-ooxml-schemas	Poi-ooxml-version-yyyymmdd.jar
Poi-ooxml-schemas	XMLBeans	Poi-ooxml-schemas-version-yyyymmdd.jar
Poi-examples	Poi, Poi-scratchpad, Poi-ooxml	Poi-examples-version-yyyymmdd.jar
Ooxml-schemas	XMLBeans	Ooxml-schemas-1.1.jar

A lot of people are confused about the poi so many jars should be imported in the end.

In fact, many times we only use POI to manipulate Excel. Even use the XLS format only.

Then there is no need to import all of them. Please refer to the following for the specific jar package you should use:

Component Map

The Apache POI distribution consists for many document file formats. This are provided in several Jar files. Not all of the Jars is needed for every format. The following tables show the relationships between POI components, Maven repository tags, and the project ' s Jar files.

Component	Application Type	Maven Artifactid	Notes
Poifs	OLE2 Filesystem	Poi	Required to work with ole2/poifs based files
Hpsf	OLE2 Property Sets	Poi
Hssf	Excel XLS	Poi	For HSSF only, if common SS are needed see below
Hslf	PowerPoint PPT	Poi-scratchpad
Hwpf	Word DOC	Poi-scratchpad
Hdgf	Visio VSD	Poi-scratchpad
Hpbf	Publisher PUB	Poi-scratchpad
Hsmf	Outlook MSG	Poi-scratchpad
Openxml4j	OOXML	Poi-ooxml Plus one of Poi-ooxml-schemas, Ooxml-schemas	Only one schemas jar are needed, see below for differences
Xssf	Excel XLSX	Poi-ooxml
Xslf	PowerPoint PPTX	Poi-ooxml
Xwpf	Word DOCX	Poi-ooxml
Common SS	Excel XLS and XLSX	Poi-ooxml	Workbookfactory and friends all require poi-ooxml, not just core poi

When we use the XLS format only, we can import Poi-version-yyyymmdd.jar.

When we also want to use the xlsx format, we also import Poi-ooxml-version-yyyymmdd.jar.

As for Poi-ooxml-schemas-version-yyyymmdd.jar, this jar is less likely to be used.

We need to use Poi-scratchpad-version-yyyymmdd.jar when we need to manipulate word, PPT, viso, Outlook, and so on.

The role of the POI jar package