CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaexcelms-officeversionfile-type
scaevity
scaevity

Reputation: 4091

determine version of microsoft office with java

I wrote a program that creates a set of data that is outputted to an excel spreadsheet. I was originally using the jexcel library to write the data to the file, but I'd like to update the program so that it can check and see whether is should create a ".xls" or ".xlsx" file, then write to the appropriate document type. Apache POI seems to be the best option in terms of writing to a ".xlsx" file, but any ideas about determining the correct file type?

I could just have the user choose when naming the file, but that seems like extra work for the user and I'm assuming that there are users who don't know what file type they'd want.

Any ideas?

Also, I'm assuming the OS is windows and the user has some version of excel, in other cases I'll just choose a default file type.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 6365

Answers (4)

Vilius Povilaika
Vilius Povilaika

Reputation: 111

Take a look at OfficeVer.

You can implement it to your script or use it for code analysis. It's cross-platform much like Java, so compiling it and implementing it directly shouldn't be a big deal. It works by extracting .docx and xlsx files and then reading the version, as well as reading directly from .doc and .xls files. OfficeVer as well has extended their support to .pdf files (current version as of time of writing is 1.03.1)

Upvotes: 0

RealHowTo
RealHowTo

Reputation: 35372

One way is to call the Windows ASSOC and FTYPE commands, capture the output and parse it to determine the Office version installed.

C:\Users\me>assoc .xls
.xls=Excel.Sheet.8

C:\Users\me>ftype Excel.sheet.8
Excel.sheet.8="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.EXE" /e

Here a quick example :

import java.io.*;
public class ShowOfficeInstalled {
    public static void main(String argv[]) {
      try {
        Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec
          (new String [] { "cmd.exe", "/c", "assoc", ".xls"});
        BufferedReader input =
          new BufferedReader
            (new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream()));
        String extensionType = input.readLine();
        input.close();
        // extract type
        if (extensionType == null) {
          System.out.println("no office installed ?");
          System.exit(1);
        }
        String fileType[] = extensionType.split("=");

        p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec
          (new String [] { "cmd.exe", "/c", "ftype", fileType[1]});
        input =
          new BufferedReader
            (new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream()));
        String fileAssociation = input.readLine();
        // extract path
        String officePath = fileAssociation.split("=")[1];
        System.out.println(officePath);
      }
      catch (Exception err) {
        err.printStackTrace();
      }
    }
  }

You may want to add more error checking and the parsing to extract the Office version from the returned path is left as an exercise ;-)

Upvotes: 8

dhorn
dhorn

Reputation: 685

You can search in the registry for the key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths

This will probably require some work, as evidenced by this question:

read/write to Windows Registry using Java

Upvotes: 1

fvu
fvu

Reputation: 32953

If you're willing to dive into the registry (eg with jregistrykey) a translated version of this PowerShell script should do what you want.

Upvotes: 0

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