The nuget download of NPOI is reaching 31 million. I do appreciate developers choosing NPOI as their Excel import and export library. Thank you for your trust and confidence in NPOI and the team behind it.
What’s NPOI
NPOI is an open-source .NET library which can help you read/write Excel and Word files. It’s the only open-source library that supports old Excel (xls files) in .NET. Although old Excel is getting less and less popular, there are still huge legacy systems that need support for old Excel.
NPOI also supports advanced features of Microsoft Excel such as cell formatting, conditional formats, formula calculation, and Excel table. Although NPOI is not Microsoft Excel, it covers 70%-80% of features owned by Microsoft Excel. It’s a friend of .NET developers to ease the interaction with Excel.
This library is a migrated project from Java. The original project is Apache POI, which is the top-level project from Apache Foundation. They did a very nice job in the Java market.
The Goal of Maintaining NPOI
The goal of maintaining this library is to ease the life of .Net developers and prevent them from using stupid and complex Office PIA interfaces.
NPOI has been maintained for about 15 years (since 2008). I’m targeting 20 years of maintainence. However, I maintain this without any income (even very few donations). My wife always blames me for why I put so much time into this useless (no money) open-source project. I always…
