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This tutorial describes how to download and install Apache POI.

Selenium does not have an inbuilt method to read data from an Excel File. However, there are various libraries in JAVA that help in reading/writing data from Excel files. Apache POI is one of the most used libraries, which provides various classes and methods to read/write data from various formats of Excel files(xls, xlsx etc).

Table of Contents

1. What is Apache POI?
2. Download Apache POI
3. How to add POI libraries in Eclipse?
4. How to add POI libraries to Maven Java Project

What is Apache POI?

Apache POI, where POI stands for (Poor Obfuscation Implementation)  is the Java API for Microsoft Documents that offers a collection of Java libraries that helps us to read, write, and manipulate different Microsoft files such as Excel sheets, PowerPoint, and Word files.

Download Apache POI

POI 5.2.3 was the last version where we produced a set of poi-bin*.zip and poi-bin*.tgz files. We will continue to publish jars to Maven Central. If you are not using a build tool like Apache Maven or Gradle, you can still find these jars by traversing the directories at https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/poi/. The jar files are present here. Download them from here.

Go to poi and get the latest jar file from here.

Step 1 – To download Apache POI, go to its official site, here. Click on the Download as shown in the image. This link will navigate to the page showing the latest release of Apache POI.  The latest Apache POI version is 5.2.3. You can follow the same steps for any version of POI.

Step 2 – This page shows the latest Apache POI Release Artifacts. Here, you can see POI 5.0.0 is the latest one. Download any one of the Binary Distribution options. One option is .ztar.gz and another option is .zip. I have selected .zip option.

Step 3 – After clicking on the link, it navigates to another page as shown below. I have used the highlighted link to download the POI library files.

Step 4 – Once POI.zip is downloaded and extracted, this is how the folder looks like

How to add POI libraries in Eclipse?

Step 1 – Below is the Java project present in Eclipse.

Step 2 – To add POI libraries to this project, Right-click on the project, hover over the Build path, select Configure Build Path.

Step 3 –  It will open the “Properties” of the project. After that, select the Libraries tab. Finally, click on the Add External JARs as highlighted below.

Step 4 – Select the JARs in the parent folder of the unzipped POI files. Subsequently, click on the Open button to include them in the Eclipse project.

Step 5 – Next, select the JARs under the ooxml-lib folder in the unzipped POI folder as highlighted below:

Step 6 – Select the JARs under the lib folder in the unzipped POI folder as highlighted below.

Step 7 – After that, once all the POI JARs add, click on the Apply and Close button as highlighted below.

Step 8 – Once all the POI libraries successfully install in the Eclipse project, they will reflect under the Referenced Libraries folder in the left pane of the Eclipse project structure, as shown below:

How to add POI libraries to Maven Java Project

You can add the poi and poi-ooxml jar files to the Maven project by mentioning the dependencies in pom.xml.

 <!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.poi/poi -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.poi</groupId>
    <artifactId>poi</artifactId>
    <version>5.0.0</version>
</dependency>


<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.poi/poi-ooxml -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.poi</groupId>
    <artifactId>poi-ooxml</artifactId>
    <version>5.0.0</version>
</dependency>

You need to make sure that these two dependencies should be of the same version.

That’s it! We have downloaded and installed Apache POI.

Congratulations on making it through this tutorial and hope you found it useful! Happy Learning!! Cheers!!