We Keep Coding

How can Apache POI use formulas in streaming mode?

I am using Apache POI 3.17 (current). When I use HSSFCell.setFormula() to insert a formula like "A1+17" it works. When I do the same in streaming mode, using SXSSFCell.setFormula() the formula appears (with a leading "=") in the input line but the displayed result in the cell is always 0.
I tried with the cell types NUMERIC and FORMULA. Here is my minimal not working example:
final SXSSFWorkbook wb = new SXSSFWorkbook();
final SXSSFSheet sheet = wb.createSheet("Test-S");
final SXSSFRow row = sheet.createRow(0);
final SXSSFCell cell1 = row.createCell(0);
cell1.setCellType(CellType.NUMERIC);
cell1.setCellValue(124);
final SXSSFCell formulaCell1 = row.createCell(1);
formulaCell1.setCellType(CellType.FORMULA);
formulaCell1.setCellFormula("A1 + 17");
final SXSSFCell formulaCell2 = row.createCell(2);
formulaCell2.setCellType(CellType.NUMERIC);
formulaCell2.setCellFormula("A1+18");
FileOutputStream os = new FileOutputStream("/tmp/test-s.xlsx");
wb.write(os);
wb.close();
os.close();
The three cells display as 124/0/0, although in the input line the formulae are displayed correctly.
Any hints are appreciated.

It works for me with Excel 2016, I get the correct results in the cells when I open the sample file. Probably older versions of Excel handle this slightly differently, please try to force evaluation of formulas with the following two things
// evaluate all formulas and store cached results
wb.getCreationHelper().createFormulaEvaluator().evaluateAll();
// suggest to Excel to recalculate the formulas itself as well
sheet.setForceFormulaRecalculation(true);
Hopefully one of those two will make it work for you as well.

The answers does not answer the question why this problem with OpenOffice/Libreoffice only occurs if SXSSFCell is used as a formula cell. When using XSSFCell as a formula cell it does not occur.
The answer is that SXSSFCell always uses a cell value, even if the formula was not evaluated at all. And the worst thing is that it uses the value 0 (zero) if if the formula was not evaluated at all. This is a fundamental misusing of the value 0 in mathematics. The value 0 explicitly does not mean that there is not a value or that there is a unknown value. It means that there is the value 0 and nothing else. So the value 0 should not be used as the cached formula result of a not evaluated formula. Instead no value should be used until the formula is evaluated. Exact as XSSFCell does.
So the really correct answer must be that apache poi should correct their SXSSFCell code.
Workaround until this:
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import org.apache.poi.xssf.streaming.*;
import org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.CellType;
import java.lang.reflect.Field;
import java.util.TreeMap;
public class CreateExcelSXSSFFormula {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
SXSSFWorkbook wb = new SXSSFWorkbook();
SXSSFSheet sheet = wb.createSheet("Test-S");
SXSSFRow row = sheet.createRow(0);
SXSSFCell cell = row.createCell(0);
cell.setCellValue(124);
SXSSFFormulaonlyCell formulacell = new SXSSFFormulaonlyCell(row, 1);
formulacell.setCellFormula("A1+17");
cell = row.createCell(2);
cell.setCellFormula("A1+17");
formulacell = new SXSSFFormulaonlyCell(row, 3);
formulacell.setCellFormula("A1+18");
cell = row.createCell(4);
cell.setCellFormula("A1+18");
wb.write(new FileOutputStream("test-s.xlsx"));
wb.close();
wb.dispose();
}
private static class SXSSFFormulaonlyCell extends SXSSFCell {
SXSSFFormulaonlyCell(SXSSFRow row, int cellidx) throws Exception {
super(row, CellType.BLANK);
Field _cells = SXSSFRow.class.getDeclaredField("_cells");
_cells.setAccessible(true);
#SuppressWarnings("unchecked") //we know the problem and expect runtime error if it possibly occurs
TreeMap<Integer, SXSSFCell> cells = (TreeMap<Integer, SXSSFCell>)_cells.get(row);
cells.put(cellidx, this);
}
#Override
public CellType getCachedFormulaResultTypeEnum() {
return CellType.BLANK;
}
}
}

Of course I should have mentioned that I use LibreOffice. I have now found that LibreOffice intentionally does not recalculate formulae from an Excel-created sheet, and it considers POI sheets as Excel-created.
See https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/12165/calc-auto-recalc-does-not-work/ .
Changing the LibreOffice settings (Tools – Options – LibreOffice Calc – formula – Recalculation on file load) helps.

how make a new line character from XML to be detected if passing from ArrayList into excel?

I need some help to pass multi line text that I stored in ArrayLists into Excel cells. I made a parser to get values from each tag and now i'm trying to build my excel but I faced a problem that text from tags like this
<ProgramName>Mirror \n 2017</ProgramName>
looks like this Mirror \\n 2017if I manually copy it into setCellValue and I thinks this double slash is my problem but I have no idea why it's even here. and my code can't make it into a new line
//progName style
CellStyle cs = wb.createCellStyle();
cs.setWrapText(true);
cs.setVerticalAlignment(VerticalAlignment.CENTER);
cs.setAlignment(HorizontalAlignment.CENTER);
//progName text
Row row = sheet1.createRow((short) 1);
Cell cell = row.createCell((short) 1);
row.setHeightInPoints((2*sheet1.getDefaultRowHeightInPoints()));
String asd = String.valueOf(ProgramName.get(0));
cell.setCellValue(asd);
sheet1.addMergedRegion(new CellRangeAddress(1,1,1,8));

thanks to Andreas
String asd = String.valueOf(ProgramName.get(0)).replaceAll("\\\\n", "\n");

How to set a cell format to Text

I am using Apache-POI 3.14. I have a need to lock-down a cell to a "Text" format. The data in my cell might be all digits, but it is still considered a string. When I write the cell, I do it like this:
cell.setCellValue("001");
cell.setCellType(Cell.CELL_TYPE_STRING);
When I open the output workbook in Excel, the cell contains the correct value ("001") and it displays with a small green triangle in the corner. Hovering over the exclamation point displays the hover text The number in this cell is formatted as text or preceded by an apostrophe. When I look at the cell formatting (Right-click -> Format cells), the "Category" is displayed as "General". I expected this to be "Text".
The problem arises when a user modifies the value in the cell by entering only digits. Because the "Category" is "General", the value is entered and displayed as a number, removing leading zeroes and right-justified.
How can I achieve the same result as Excel's "Format cells" dialog?

You can try to set the cell-format to text via
DataFormat fmt = wb.createDataFormat();
CellStyle cellStyle = wb.createCellStyle();
cellStyle.setDataFormat(
fmt.getFormat("#"));
cell.setCellStyle(cellStyle);
Note: CellStyles shoudl be re-used for all applicable cells, do not create new ones for every cell.
You could also try to use the "Ignore errors" feature in the .xlsx format, however support for it is not fully done yet, see Issue 46136 and Issue 58641 for some ongoing discussion.
See also this MSDN page for some additional information

For HSSF,
DataFormat fmt = workbook.createDataFormat();
CellStyle textStyle = workbook.createCellStyle();
textStyle.setDataFormat(fmt.getFormat("#"));
sheet.setDefaultColumnStyle(0, textStyle);
It just sets the whole column style as Text and set category as Text .
However, if you are using XSSF format, it doesn't work(I am using Apache Poi 3.15 and didn't work for me).
In this case you have set style to each cell you want to treat as text in addition to above code using:
cell.setCellStyle(textStyle);
Regarding error, you could use
sheet.addIgnoredErrors(new CellRangeAddress(0,9999,0,9999),IgnoredErrorType.NUMBER_STORED_AS_TEXT );
It ignores the NUMBER_STORED_AS_TEXT error for row 0 till 9999 and column 0 till 9999 and you wont see it.

Look like OP was asking for Apache solution. After some searching I found this answer:
HSSFCellStyle style = book.createCellStyle();
style.setDataFormat(BuiltInFormats.getBuiltInFormat("text"));

In this case, I'm using Apache-POI 3.15, and I had the same problem, so I validated the data in my style, I need numbers >0 and strings:
try {
if (Integer.parseInt(field + "") >= 0) {
int valor = Integer.parseInt(field + "");
cell.setCellValue(valor); //Int
}
} catch (NumberFormatException nfe) {
// no int
try {
if (Double.parseDouble(field + "") >= 0) {
double valor = Double.parseDouble(field + ""); //double
cell.setCellValue(valor);
}
} catch (NumberFormatException nfe2) {
cell.setCellValue(field + ""); //String
}
}

For Apache POI 4.0.1 :
XSSFSheet sheet = workbook.createSheet("MySheetName");
sheet.addIgnoredErrors(new CellRangeAddress(0, 9999, 0, 9999), IgnoredErrorType.NUMBER_STORED_AS_TEXT);
Be careful to cast your sheet to org.apache.poi.xssf.usermodel.XSSFSheet and not to org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.Sheet, otherwise the method addIgnoredErrors wil be unknown.

How to do Excel's "Convert to Number" in Java

I am reading data from Excel using Apache POI. I want to convert some cells to number while reading in Java as following:
Input 01.0234500
Output 1.02345
Input 412206362371
Output 4.12206E+11
Input 1234.201400002345
Output 1234.2014
When I am using "Convert to Number" in Excel, it works fine. But I want the same output while reading Excel cells in Java.
It can also be achieved using =VALUE() function in Excel. But how do I implement the same functionality in Java?

I think there are a number of ways to accomplish what you stipulate, but the most direct method is just to use the VALUE() function and then evaluate it. This certainly is not the most efficient method, but it works.
Essentially we just read in the value of the input cell, then create a new cell formula cell which contains the VALUE() function with the original value as the parameter. After that we call evalutateInCell to evaluate the VALUE() function and replace the cell value with the results.
XSSFWorkbook wb = new XSSFWorkbook();
XSSFSheet sheet = wb.createSheet("test");
Row row = sheet.createRow(0);
Cell inCell = row.createCell(0);
inCell.setCellValue("01.0234500");
Cell outCell = row.createCell(1);
FormulaEvaluator fev = wb.getCreationHelper().createFormulaEvaluator();
String value = inCell.getStringCellValue();
outCell.setCellFormula("VALUE(" + value + ")");
fev.evaluateInCell(outCell);
You can use the same method to replace the contents of the original cell if that is your preference.

This worked for me
new BigDecimal(cell.getNumericCellValue()).toPlainString()

Apache POI Excel - how to configure columns to be expanded?

I am using Apache POI API to generate excel spreadsheet to output some data.
The problem I am facing is when the spreadsheet is created and opened, columns are not expanded so that some long text like Date formatted text is not showing up on first glance.
I could just double click the column border in excel to expand or drag the border to adjust the column width but there could be 20+ columns and there is no way I want to do that manually every time I open the spreadsheet :(
I found out (though could be wrong method) groupRow() and setColumnGroupCollapsed() might be able to do the trick but no luck. Maybe I'm using it in wrong way.
Sample Code snippet
Workbook wb = new HSSFWorkbook();
CreationHelper createHelper = wb.getCreationHelper();
//create sheet
Sheet sheet = wb.createSheet("masatoSheet");
//not really working yet.... :(
//set group for expand/collapse
//sheet.groupRow(0, 10); //just random fromRow toRow argument values...
//sheet.setColumnGroupCollapsed(0, true);
//create row
Row row = sheet.createRow((short)0);
//put a cell in the row and store long text data
row.createCell(0).setCellValue("Loooooooong text not to show up first");
When this spreadsheet is created, the "Looooooong text not to show up first" string is in the cell but since the column is not expanded only "Loooooooo" is showing up.
How can I configure it so that when I open my spreadsheet, the column is already expanded???

After you have added all your data to the sheet, you can call autoSizeColumn(int column) on your sheet to autofit the columns to the proper size
Here is a link to the API.
See this post for more reference
Problem in fitting the excel cell size to the size of the content when using apache poi

Tip : To make Auto size work , the call to sheet.autoSizeColumn(columnNumber) should be made after populating the data into the excel.
Calling the method before populating the data, will have no effect.

If you want to auto size all columns in a workbook, here is a method that might be useful:
public void autoSizeColumns(Workbook workbook) {
int numberOfSheets = workbook.getNumberOfSheets();
for (int i = 0; i < numberOfSheets; i++) {
Sheet sheet = workbook.getSheetAt(i);
if (sheet.getPhysicalNumberOfRows() > 0) {
Row row = sheet.getRow(sheet.getFirstRowNum());
Iterator<Cell> cellIterator = row.cellIterator();
while (cellIterator.hasNext()) {
Cell cell = cellIterator.next();
int columnIndex = cell.getColumnIndex();
sheet.autoSizeColumn(columnIndex);
}
}
}
}

You can try something like this:
HSSFSheet summarySheet = wb.createSheet();
summarySheet.setColumnWidth(short column, short width);
Here params are:column number in sheet and its width
But,the units of width are pretty small, you can try 4000 for example.

For Excel POI:
sheetName.autoSizeColumn(cellnum);

sample code below
HSSFWorkbook wb = new HSSFWorkbook();
HSSFSheet sheet = wb.createSheet("your sheet name");
HSSFRow row = sheet.createRow(0);
cell = row.createCell(0);
cell.setCellValue("A BIG NAME WITH AUTO SIZE FEATURE ENABLED");
//this is crucial
sheet.autoSizeColumn(0);
//argument must be cell number
cell = row.createCell(1);
cell.setCellValue("a big name without auto size feature enabled");
Check the output and go nuts :)

If you know the count of your columns (f.e. it's equal to a collection list). You can simply use this one liner to adjust all columns of one sheet (if you use at least java 8):
IntStream.range(0, columnCount).forEach(sheet::autoSizeColumn)

You can add this, after your loop.
for (int i = 0; i<53;i++) {
sheet.autoSizeColumn(i);
}

I use below simple solution:
This is your workbook and sheet:
XSSFWorkbook workbook = new XSSFWorkbook();
XSSFSheet sheet = workbook.createSheet("YOUR Workshhet");
then add data to your sheet with columns and rows. Once done with adding data to sheet write following code to autoSizeColumn width.
for (int columnIndex = 0; columnIndex < 15; columnIndex++) {
sheet.autoSizeColumn(columnIndex);
}
Here, instead 15, you add the number of columns in your sheet.
Hope someone helps this.

You can use setColumnWidth() if you want to expand your cell more.

Its very simple, use this one line code
dataSheet.autoSizeColumn(0)
or give the number of column in bracket
dataSheet.autoSizeColumn(cell number )

You can wrap the text as well. PFB sample code:
CellStyle wrapCellStyle = new_workbook.createCellStyle();
wrapCellStyle.setWrapText(true);