Thursday, February 11, 2016

That an Excel File (.xlsx) Is Just A Zip File

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How Did I End Up Inside An Excel File?

Well, I am a Java Developer for more than 4 years now and I am working on a project that involves reading an Excel file. I've been using Apache POI and am encountering problems loading large files. After a few hours of research, I ended up with recommendations of streaming the file and reading it as XML.

The Zip File

Reading a lot, even comments to answers, I discovered that .xlsx is just a zip file that contains lots of XML files inside. So one way of overcoming the GC overhead limit exceeded error that I always encounter is to stream it and read it as XML file.

I'd be doing another post to detail what I did to solve this. For the mean time that's it an Excel file is just a ZIP file of XML files.

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