Cheat Sheet (PDF)

This content was generated with the assistance of AI and should be verified against the official documentation before being relied on in production.

The reference material consulted while preparing these pages is listed in the section bibliography.

A single A4 page to print or keep beside the editor, with the baseline date 2026-10-09 and Apache POI 5.5.1. POI 6.0 has not been released, so the last block of the sheet lists what is announced for it. It covers:

  • the jar, component and format map with the Maven coordinates, and the "which API?" table (usermodel, SXSSF, event reading and XLSB);

  • the workbook skeleton with try-with-resources, cells, CellType, DataFormatter and DateUtil;

  • styles, fonts and formats with the style-reuse rule, formulas and FormulaEvaluator, and layout and printing;

  • validation, conditional formatting, tables, pivot tables and charts in one line each;

  • the SXSSF window, flushRows and temporary files, and the XSSFReader plus SheetContentsHandler skeleton;

  • the XWPF skeleton, the placeholder-replacement rule for text split across runs, HWPF, text extraction with Tika and document properties;

  • Agile encryption, the security limits and the formula-injection rule;

  • Spring Boot download and upload snippets with MIME types and size limits, and the import validation pattern; and

  • the limits table (rows, columns, characters, styles) and the changes from 4.0 to 6.0.

Download the cheat sheet (PDF)

References

  • Section bibliography for the official documentation, standards and books behind every line of the sheet.