The Apache Software Foundation

Changes
------------
The most notable changes in this release are:

*  A "lite" version of ooxml-schemas-1.0.jar called poi-ooxml-schemas-3.6-20091214.jar is included in the binary distribution.
This jar replaces the big ooxml-schemas-1.0.jar in the binary distributions and Maven POMs. The poi-ooxml-schemas jar is 10 MB smaller!

* Significant memory improvements in XSSF module. When generating data, new code consumes 200% less memory than POI-3.5.

* Full support for cell comments in XSSF.

* Formula performance and coverage.
 Lazy evaluation of formulas has been implemented which provides for improvements of 700% in some cases.
 Your results may vary.

* Examples are now included.
 poi-examples-3.6-20091214.jar includes all of the examples from the poi, poi-scratchpad and poi-ooxml modules.
 Users have requested this several times.  These examples provide excellent templates for POI based applications.
 Several convertors are included: XLSX2CSV, XLS2CSVmra, BigGridDemo, PPT2PNG, Word2Forrest, and msg2txt.

* Maven distribution now includes sources.
Each individual JAR is accompanied by a -sources.jar. Two new maven modules were added poi-ooxml-schemas and poi-examples.

* Program elements intended for POI internal use only are annotated @Internal.
These may be removed or access changed from 'public' to 'default' or less in future versions of POI.

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-3.6-20091214.zip or poi-bin-3.6-20091214.tar.gz)
 - source archive you can build POI from (poi-src-3.6-20091214.zip or poi-src-3.6-20091214.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 "3.6"

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_6/KEYS

Contributors
------------

The following people have contributed to this release by submitting bug
reports or by participating in the issue resolution process (in strict alphabetical order).

Bernhard Schwager         Ian Beaumont                Maxim Valyanskiy
Bob Stox                  Jeremy Michelson            Paul Tomlin
Bruno Girin               Jeff Lamb                   Petr Udalau
Chris Lott                Joubert Nel                 Robert Longson
Dale Monti                Karl Eilebrecht             Robin Salkeld
Daniel Noll (Trejkaz)     Leonhard Wimmer             Thang Nguyen
David Agnew               Mads Mohr Christensen       Vinu Kumar
David Horwitz             Markus Herven
Davor Cubranic            Marcus Thiesen
Eric Smith                Martin Poelman

Thank you all very much! Contributions are always welcome, come join the project.

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, Visio and
Word. Since POI 3.5, the new OOXML (Office Open XML) formats introduced in Office 2007 have been supported.
See http://poi.apache.org/ for more details