Your First Aspose.Cells Application - Hello World

This beginner’s topic shows how developers can create a simple first application (Hello World) using Aspose.Cells' simple API. The application creates a Microsoft Excel file with the words Hello World in a specified cell of a worksheet.

Creating the Hello World Application

To create the Hello World application using Aspose.Cells API:

1. Create an instance of the Workbook class.
2. Apply the license:
   1. If you have purchased a license, then use the license in your application to get access to Aspose.Cells' full functionality
   2. If you are using the evaluation version of the component (if you’re using Aspose.Cells without a license), skip this step.
3. Create a new Microsoft Excel file, or open an existing file in which you want to add/update some text.
4. Access any cell of a worksheet in the Microsoft Excel file.
5. Insert the words Hello World! into a cell accessed.
6. Generate the modified Microsoft Excel file.

The examples below demonstrate the above steps.

Creating a Workbook

The following example creates a new workbook from scratch, writes the words “Hello World!” into cell A1 on the first worksheet, and saves the file.

The generated spreadsheet

// For complete examples and data files, please go to https://github.com/aspose-cells/Aspose.Cells-for-Java
// The path to the documents directory.
String dataDir = Utils.getDataDir(CreatingWorkbook.class);
// Creating a file input stream to reference the license file
FileInputStream fstream = new FileInputStream("Aspose.Cells.lic");

// Create a License object
License license = new License();

// Applying the Aspose.Cells license
license.setLicense(fstream);

// Instantiating a Workbook object that represents a Microsoft Excel
// file.
Workbook wb = new Workbook();

// Note when you create a new workbook, a default worksheet, "Sheet1", is by default added to the workbook. Accessing the
// first worksheet in the book ("Sheet1").
Worksheet sheet = wb.getWorksheets().get(0);

// Access cell "A1" in the sheet.
Cell cell = sheet.getCells().get("A1");

// Input the "Hello World!" text into the "A1" cell
cell.setValue("Hello World!");

// Save the Microsoft Excel file.
wb.save(dataDir + "MyBook.xls", FileFormatType.EXCEL_97_TO_2003);
wb.save(dataDir + "MyBook.xlsx");
wb.save(dataDir + "MyBook.ods");

Opening an Existing File

The following example opens an existing Microsoft Excel template file called book1.xls, writes the words “Hello World!” in cell A1 in the first worksheet, and saves the workbook as a new file.

// For complete examples and data files, please go to https://github.com/aspose-cells/Aspose.Cells-for-Java
// The path to the documents directory.
String dataDir = Utils.getDataDir(OpeningExistingFile.class);
// Creating a file input stream to reference the license file
FileInputStream fstream = new FileInputStream("Aspose.Cells.lic");

// Create a License object
License license = new License();

// Set the license of Aspose.Cells to avoid the evaluation limitations
license.setLicense(fstream);

// Instantiate a Workbook object that represents an Excel file
Workbook workbook = new Workbook(dataDir + "book1.xls");

// Get the reference of "A1" cell from the cells of a worksheet
Cell cell = workbook.getWorksheets().get(0).getCells().get("A1");

// Set the "Hello World!" value into the "A1" cell
cell.setValue("Hello World!");

// Write the Excel file
workbook.save(dataDir + "HelloWorld.xls", FileFormatType.EXCEL_97_TO_2003);
workbook.save(dataDir + "HelloWorld.xlsx");
workbook.save(dataDir + "HelloWorld.ods");