Extract metadata from Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets

To extract metadata from Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets getMetadata method is used. This method allows to extract the following metadata:

Name	Description
title	The title of the spreadsheet.
subject	The subject of the spreadsheet.
keywords	The keyword of the spreadsheet.
comments	The comments of the spreadsheet.
content-status	The content status of the spreadsheet.
category	The category of the spreadsheet.
company	The company of the spreadsheet.
manager	The manager of the spreadsheet.
author	The name of the spreadsheet’s author.
last-author	The name of the last spreadsheet’s author.
hyperlink-base	The base string used for evaluating relative hyperlinks in this spreadsheet.
application	The name of the application.
application-version	The version number of the application that created the spreadsheet.
template	The informational name of the spreadsheet template.
created-time	The time of the spreadsheet creation.
last-saved-time	The time of the the spreadsheet when it was last saved.
last-printed-time	The time of the spreadsheet when it was last printed.
revision-number	The spreadsheet revision number.
total-editing-time	The total editing time in minutes.

Here are the steps to extract metadata from Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet:

Instantiate Parser object for the initial spreadsheet;
Call getMetadata method and obtain collection of document metadata objects;
Iterate through the collection and get metadata names and values.

getMetadata method returns null value if metadata extraction isn’t supported for the document. For example, metadata extraction isn’t supported for CSV files. Therefore, for CSV file getMetadata method returns null. If Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet has no metadata, getMetadata method returns an empty collection.

The following example demonstrates how to extract metadata from Excel spreadsheet:

// Create an instance of Parser class
try (Parser parser = new Parser(Constants.SampleXlsx)) {
    // Extract metadata from the spreadsheet
    Iterable<MetadataItem> metadata = parser.getMetadata();
    // Iterate over metadata items
    for (MetadataItem item : metadata) {
        // Print an item name and value
        System.out.println(String.format("%s: %s", item.getName(), item.getValue()));
    }
}

More resources

GitHub examples

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