Extracting text from a spreadsheet

There is a lot of useful data found in spreadsheets. In this recipe, we will illustrate how to extract text from an Excel spreadsheet using the Apache PDFBox API. We will create a sample spreadsheet for the examples to work against.

Getting ready

To prepare this recipe, we need to do the following:

1. Create a new Maven project.
2. Add the following dependency to the project's POM file:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.pdfbox</groupId>
    <artifactId>pdfbox</artifactId>
    <version>2.0.13</version>
</dependency>

3. Create a new Excel spreadsheet that appears as follows. The last cell entry contains a hyperlink to www.weather.com:

4. Modify...