org.apache.poi.contrib.poibrowser

The POI Browser is a very simple Swing GUI tool that displays the internal structure of a Microsoft Office file. It concentrates on streams in the Horrible Property Set Format (HPSF). In order to access these streams the POI Browser uses the package org.apache.poi.hpsf.

A file in Microsoft's Office format can be seen as a filesystem within a file. For example, a Word document like sample.doc is just a simple file from the operation system's point of view. However, internally it is organized into various directories and files. For example, sample.doc might consist of the three internal files (or "streams", as Microsoft calls them) \001CompObj, \005SummaryInformation, and WordDocument. (In these names \001 and \005 denote the unprintable characters with the character codes 1 and 5, respectively.) A more complicated Word file typically contains a directory named ObjectPool with more directories and files nested within it.

The POI Browser makes these internal structures visible. It takes one or more Microsoft files as input on the command line and shows directories and files in a tree-like structure. On the top-level POI Browser displays the (operating system) filenames. An internal file (i.e. a "stream" or a "document") is shown with its name, its size and a hexadecimal dump of its first bytes.

Property Set Streams

The POI Browser pays special attention to property set streams. For example, the \005SummaryInformation stream contains information like title and author of the document. The POI Browser opens every stream in a POI filesystem. If it encounters a property set stream, it displays not just its first bytes but analyses the whole stream and displays its contents in a more or less readable manner.

Running POI Browser

Running the POI Browser requires you to start a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and to set up a valid classpath so that the JVM can find all the Java classes it needs. These are the main POI classes and the "contrib" POI classes.

The following instructions assume that you have set up your Java enviromnent variables properly, i.e. the variable JAVA_HOME contains the name of your Java installation directory and the variable PATH includes the bin subdirectory of the Java installation directory. At the time of this writing the current POI version was 2.5.1-final dating from August 4th, 2004. The example statements reflect version numbering and date. Change the commands accordingly if you are running the POI Browser of a later or earlier than this!

java -classpath /opt/local/poi/poi-2.5.1-final-20040804.jar:/opt/local/poi/poi-contrib-2.5.1-final-20040804.jar org.apache.poi.contrib.poibrowser.POIBrowser MyWord.doc MyExcel.xls MyPowerpoint.ppt

java -classpath C:\Programs\POI\poi-2.5.1-final-20040804.jar;C:\Programs\POI\poi-contrib-2.5.1-final-20040804.jar org.apache.poi.contrib.poibrowser.POIBrowser MyWord.doc MyExcel.xls MyPowerpoint.ppt