Excel is arguably the most used format for documentation by businesses organizations. One can speculate why that is the case: loosely-structured text format, tendency of people to think of complex data sets in table format, available on almost every desktop. While most of us can think of better ways to capture and manage business data, the fact remains, Excel is here to stay and a lot of information used in IT projects is in that format. This article is about my experience in processing Excel files using Java.