How to use POI SXSSF to read a large spreadsheet

Question

I am trying to read an xls file by using SXSSF. I have read about SXSSF, but do not understandexactly how to use it. So I am running into some problems.

Can anybody help me with the java code for reading large xls files (some 100,000 rows and 7-8 sheets).

(Edit from the comments)

Here is what I have tried:

Workbook workBook = new SXSSFWorkbook(200); 
workBook = WorkbookFactory.create(inputStream); 
Sheet sheet = workBook.getSheetAt(0); 
int totalRows = sheet.getPhysicalNumberOfRows(); 

for (int i=0; i<totalRows; i++) { 
    Row row = sheet.getRow(i); 
    int totalCols = row.getPhysicalNumberOfCells(); 
    for(int j=0; j<totalCols; j++) { 
        Cell cell = row.getCell(j); 
    } 
 } 

Answer 1

SXSSF is only to write large excel files (xlsx) and not to read.

To read large excel files, please refer to SAX parsing based event handling API of Apache POI at: https://poi.apache.org/components/spreadsheet/how-to.html.

A very good working example is present at: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/poi/trunk/src/examples/src/org/apache/poi/examples/xssf/eventusermodel/XLSX2CSV.java