# HSSF

Alternatives to HSSF

# Alternatives

Maybe it's unwise to advertise your competitors but we believe competition is good and we have the best support reading and write Excel workbooks currently available.

Product | URL | Description
Formula One | www.tidestone.com | An alternative to this project is to buy the $10,000 Formula 1 library and accept its crude api and limitations.
Visual Basic | www.microsoft.com | Give up XML and write Visual Basic code on a Microsoft Windows based Environment or output in Microsoft's beta and primarily undocumented XML for office format.
JExcel | http://stareyes.homeip.net:8888 | Frequently unavailable. Little currently known about it's capabilities.
JWorkbook | http://www.object-refinery.com/jworkbook/index.html | This effort supports Gnumeric and Excel, however the Excel part is done using POI anyway.
xlReader | http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/xlrd | Provides decent support for reading Excel.
Excel ODBC Driver | http://www.nwlink.com/~leewal/content/exceljavasample.htm | ODBC offers a somewhat wierd method for using Excel.
ExtenXLS | http://www.extentech.com/products/ExtenXLS/docs/intro3.jsp | Commercial library for reading, modifying and writing Excel spreadsheets. Not cheap but certainly a lot more affordable than Formula 1. No idea as to it's quality.
J-Integra Java-Excel Bridge | http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/bridging/jintegra.asp | Uses DCOM to an Excel instance on a windows machine.
Perl & C | - | There are a number of perl and C libraries, however none of them are consistent.