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has anybody found a library that works well with large spreadsheets?

I've tried apache's POI but it fails miserably working with large files - both reading and writing. It uses massive amounts of memory leaving you needing a supercomputer to parse or create a 20+mb spreadsheet.

Surely there is a more memory efficient way and someone has written it?!

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  • Are you sure you need a spreadsheet, not a (embedded) database? Or maybe even CSV? Commented Dec 3, 2009 at 23:13
  • Well, then you're practically lost. Or, wait .. Is xlsx allowed? Or must it really be xls? Commented Dec 4, 2009 at 11:51
  • xlsx is fine .. anything that can have multiple worksheets, formulas, formatting etc and open in excel. Commented Dec 5, 2009 at 5:38
  • CSV files can be opened on Excel. Commented Jun 8, 2010 at 6:08
  • I have updated BigGridDemo to support multiple sheets. Answer at [stackoverflow.com/questions/7274076/… [1]: stackoverflow.com/questions/7274076/… Commented Sep 14, 2011 at 13:44

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@pstanton.. I was working on a similar solution and was able to write large excel 2007 files with hundreds of rows exported from database. Here is the link to it: http://vikramvkamath.blogspot.com/2010/07/writing-large-excel-files-excel-2007.html

My solution is an extension on Yegor Koslov's SheetWriter class follow this http link and it works very well for me. Let me know in case you face any issues.

~Vikram

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thanks vikram ... your blog post is interesting and i will have a detailed read of it when i find time.
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I cannot really recommend a library to you. But when you need the best performance, it might be worth a try to go to the people who came up with Excel in the first place. I guess the APIs that are available from .NET are much more efficient in handling Excel files. So the idea would be to implement a web service or similiar component in .NET that does most of the Excel-related grunt work for you and just invoke that from Java.

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This is the best solution, since earlier she said that it cannot be any kind of database or CSV, but must be excel. So use Microsoft technologies if you're in love with Excel and cant use anything else. The .NET stuff really works pretty great together.
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This is basically the same idea as Jannik's, but you use the Java COM Bridge to access the Excel APIs directly from Java. We have had good success doing this with Word. Obvious downside is that it only works on Windows.

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Have you tried JExcelAPI as an alternative to POI ? I confess I can't comment on it's memory efficiency.

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pretty sure it reads a whole worksheet at a time, which would run into memory issues.
Well, I think the issue is how efficient JExcelAPI is at reading that spreadsheet, compared to POI.
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at time of posting, there is no pure java scalable solution for reading and writing large excel files.

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Use the new SXSSF poi 3.8 for xlsx files stackoverflow.com/a/11919450/403999
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May be CSV file format can help you. You just need to seperate each value by comma and save file with .csv extension.

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