poi/RELEASE-NOTES.txt

The Apache POI is pleased to announce the release of POI 3.8.  The release is available for download at:

http://poi.apache.org/download.html

See the full release notes below for details about this release.

Release Notes -- Apache POI -- Version 3.8

Introduction
------------

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. See http://poi.apache.org/ for more details

Apache POI 3.8 is an incremental feature release based on and
compatible with earlier POI 3.8-beta* releases. POI 3.8 is considered stable and recommended for production use.

Release highlights:

* NPOIFS:  NIO driven API to read OLE2 filesystems with low memory footprint.  
* SXSSF:  a low-memory footprint  API built on top of XSSF that can be used when very large spreadsheets have to be produced, and heap space is limited
* poi-excelant: Ant tasks for running POI against a workbook
* Supported evaluation of new Excel formulas: IRR,NPV,MROUND,VAR,VARP,CLEAN,CHAR,ADDRESS,HOUR,MINUTE,SECOND,RATE,WORKDAY,NETWORKDAYS,SUMIFS,RANK
* XSLF usermodel API:  POI's implementation of the PowerPoint 2007 OOXML (.xlsx) file format. XSLF provides a rich usermodel API and a PPTX2PNG utility to export slides to images.
* WordToFO, WordToHtml and WordToText converters: utilities to export MS Word .doc files into XSL-FO, html and text files. Output from WordToFO can be used to convert .doc files to pdf using Apache FOP.

Other notable changes:
* Numerous improvements and refactorings in HWPF, Java API for MS Word .doc files: support for reading 
  footnotes, endnotes and bookmarks, improved support for hadlings tables, paragraphs, text runs and much more...
* Initial support for charts in XSSF
* support for OOXML Agile Encryption

A full list of changes is available in the change log: http://poi.apache.org/changes.html. 
People interested should also follow the dev mailing list to track further progress.

Release Contents
----------------

This release comes in two forms:
 - pre-built binaries containing compiled versions of all Apache POI components and documentation 
   (poi-bin-3.8-20120326.zip or poi-bin-3.8-20120326.tar.gz)
 - source archive you can build POI from (poi-src-3.8-20120326.zip or poi-src-3.8-20120326.tar.gz)
  Unpack the archive and use  the following command to build all POI components with Apache Ant 1.6+ and JDK 1.5 or higher:

  ant jar

 Pre-built versions of all POI components are also available in the central Maven repository 
 under Group ID "org.apache.poi" and Version "3.8"

All release artifacts are accompanied by MD5 checksums and a PGP signatures 
that you can use to verify the authenticity of your download.
The public key used for the PGP signature can be found at 
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/poi/tags/REL_3_8_FINAL/KEYS