The Apache POI project is pleased to announce the release of POI 3.12-beta1. Featured are a handful of new areas of functionality, and numerous bug fixes. See the downloads page for binary and source distributions: http://poi.apache.org/download.html Note: The Apache Software Foundation uses an extensive mirroring network for distributing releases. It is possible that the mirror you are using may not have replicated the release yet. If that is the case, please try another mirror. This also goes for Maven access. Release Notes Changes ------------ The most notable changes in this release are: * Mapping of symbol characters to unicode equivalent (49541) * Add methods to set margins in sections of HWPF documents (53453) * Add support for cropped images (54541) * Add implementations of DMIN and DGET functions (57007) * XSSF custom column label names for pivot tables (57063) * Support for Office Binary Document and RC4 CryptoAPI Encryption for HSLF (57195) 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-3.12-beta1-20150228.zip or poi-bin-3.12-beta1-20150228.tar.gz) - source archive you can build POI from (poi-src-3.12-beta1-20150228.zip or poi-src-3.12-beta1-20150228.tar.gz) Unpack the archive and use the following command to build all POI components with Apache Ant 1.6+ and JDK 1.6 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 "3.12-beta1" 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_12_BETA1/KEYS About Apache POI ----------------------- Apache POI is well-known in the Java field as a library for reading and writing Microsoft Office file formats, such as Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Visio, Publisher and Outlook. It supports both the older (OLE2) and new (OOXML - Office Open XML) formats. See http://poi.apache.org/ for more details On behalf of the Apache POI PMC, Andi