Need help with document reading/writing program

Hey all,

I am fairly new to java and looking to make a program to simplify some of the work I need to do daily. I have a Mac with the latest version of eclipse and the latest versions of Word and Excel.

The goal of the program is to read an excel spreadsheet with a few pieces of information in about 13,000 rows. Then it will pick x number of random rows in the spreadsheet and print those selections in either a new Excel or Word document.

I never learned how read/write to and from other files, and I am wondering if something like this is possible as it would save hours and hours of time.

Thanks.

See Lesson: Basic I/O (The Java™ Tutorials > Essential Classes)
and for reading Microsoft Office documents (word, excel,etc..), see Apache POI - the Java API for Microsoft Documents
Both links have code examples that should get you started.

Thanks I looked through those and I think I am basically done with the second half of my program. However, while reading the API for reading/recording an excel document, I am completely lost. I cant find a way to do what I want in the different things they list.

I want the program to read my excel sheet, and return 1. The total number of columns with information in them in the document and 2. The information in each of the cells of that column

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Thanks I looked through those and I think I am basically done with the second half of my program. However, while reading the API for reading/recording an excel document, I am completely lost. I cant find a way to do what I want in the different things they list.

I want the program to read my excel sheet, and return 1. The total number of columns with information in them in the document and 2. The information in each of the cells of that column

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The examples in those links should hopefully help get you started, but probably won't do what you need. To use a 3rd party lib like apache POI you should become familiar with the API docs - the classes and methods of the library. The code snippets are just examples to get you started.