Compatibility with POI

[fabianfrz]

It would be nice if there would be an implementation of ODF for Apache POI so it would be easy to use it just as an alternative output format.

[svanteschubert]

@fabianfrz Wouldn't this be a feature request at Apache POI, or am I misunderstanding you?

[fabianfrz]

Not sure, currently it works the way that the standard version supports the old MS Office formats and there is an extension (also from the POI devs) to support OOXML.

So I am not sure, if they would support ODF too, but it's just an idea.

[xzel23]

I think that won't happen. Both formats are too far apart. Yes there once was the idea of doing an 'Apache POI' supporting the ODF format, but I think it has been abandoned. (I'm a member of both projects.)

I think what you really need is either a converter that converts from one format to another (maybe pandoc, maybe something else works better), or a file format agnostic library that supports both and usually will pull in both POI and ODFToolkit as dependencies.

This is actually how I ended up here: I wanted to add ODF support to my spreadsheet library (currently supports xls(x), CSV, and JDBBC sources as input, xls(x), CSV, HTML, Swing, JavaFX as output). If you are interested in something like that, drop me a note. But it is still far from supporting ODF because too many feature are still missing from ODFToolkit (but Svante already assigned some to me, so there is hope).

[svanteschubert]

@fabianfrz this issue is not in the ODF Toolkit's hands. I will nevertheless propagate a higher-level semantic abstraction between both office formats, like it has been done at the EU e-Invoice standard EN 16931, I am working on.