Excel extraction library (Plex)

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 23:01:00 +0100

Motivation

Due to my vocational experience I need to frequently work with technical information specified using Microsoft Excel files. With a lot of help using the Apache POI I often managed to support such files. Using them always required to solve the following problems:

Identify the table structures.

Transform cell contents into the desired data types.

Error-Handling in case the cell contents weren’t supported.

Representation of the data using a comfortable data structure.

For this reason I’ve developed Plex which is used to simplify the import of MS Excel files. Basically Plex consists of a generic Importer which is capable to translate a single workbook into a collection of Java TableModel instances. This import process is controlled using a declaration of the useful data.