Extract Text from Textbox in Excel Using Java

Textbox in Excel can add additional information to the existing table, and my previous post has once introduced how to programmatically add a textbox with text to a Excel document. In this article, you will learn how to extract text from textbox within a worksheet using the same free Java API (Free Spire.XLS for Java).

Installation (2 Method)

1# Download the free API and unzip it, then add the Spire.Xls.jar file to your project as dependency.

2# Directly add the jar dependency to maven project by adding the following configurations to the pom.xml.

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>com.e-iceblue</id>
        <name>e-iceblue</name>
        <url>http://repo.e iceblue.com/nexus/content/groups/public/</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>
<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>e-iceblue</groupId>
        <artifactId>spire.xls.free</artifactId>
        <version>5.1.0</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

Steps and Sample Code

1. Create a Workbook instance.
2. Load a sample Excel file using Workbook.loadFromFile() method.
3. Get a specified worksheet using Workbook.getWorksheets().get() method.
4. Get a specified textbox using Worksheet.getTextBoxes().get() method.
5. Get the text in the specified textbox using XlsTextBoxShape.getText() method.

import com.spire.xls.Workbook;
import com.spire.xls.Worksheet;
import com.spire.xls.core.spreadsheet.shapes.XlsTextBoxShape;

public class ExtractTextFromTextbox {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        //Create a Workbook instance
        Workbook workbook = new Workbook();

        //Load a sample Excel file
        workbook.loadFromFile("input.xlsx");

        //Get the first worksheet
        Worksheet sheet = workbook.getWorksheets().get(0);

        //Get the first textbox
        XlsTextBoxShape shape = (XlsTextBoxShape)sheet.getTextBoxes().get(0);

        //Get the text inside the textbox
        String text = shape.getText();
        System.out.print(text);
    }
}