[ANNOUNCE] Apache POI 3.5 Beta 4 Released

Hi All,

The POI team is pleased to announce the availability of Apache POI 3.5 beta 4, our latest beta including OOXML (Office 
Open XML) support.

Apache POI is well-known in the Java field as a library for reading and
writing Microsoft Office file formats, such as Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and
Word. With POI 3.5, it supports the new OOXML (Office Open XML) formats introduced in Office 2007. See 
http://poi.apache.org/ for more details

The status of this release is a beta, meaning that we encourage users to try it out.
If you find any bugs, please report them to the POI bug database or to the poi-dev mailing list.

Release Highlights:

   POI-SS - Java API To Access Microsoft Excel Format Files
   * This common interface allows access to HSSF (binary file format, .xls) and XSSF (ooxml file format, .xlsx) in the 
same way
   * Very similar to HSSF usermodel, allowing easy translation of old code support to the new format
   * All of HSSF should support this interface
   * Full implementation of XSSF for this interface

   POI-XSSF - Java API To Access Microsoft Excel 2007 OOXML Format Files
   * full implementation of high level interface
   * text extraction supported
   * low level, low memory parsing supported

A full list of changes is available in the change log:
http://poi.apache.org/changes.html

The source and binaries can be downloaded from your local mirror:
http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/poi/dev/

The release is also available from the central Maven repository under
Group ID "org.apache.poi" and Version "3.5-beta4".

For the Apache POI Team
Yegor Kozlov