Created attachment 24181 [details] short sample to create XLS with error A 2.6Mb POI-generated XLS file was causing Open Office to crash and Excel 2007 to report errors on opening the file. I tracked the problem down to one cell that was being filled with 39553 characters, which of course is over Excel's stated limit of 32767 character per cell. I've written a wrapper to trap this in our own code, but would it be appropriate for setCellValue() itself to throw an exception when this happens? Cheers! And thanks for the VERY useful library. :-)
A good catch, thanks. I fixed HSSFCell to throw IllegalArgumentException if the text argument is longer than 32,767 characters, the limit for the XLS format. Note, that this is only "write" restriction. POI still can read .xls files with text in cells longer than the limit, for example, created by OpenOffice. The fix was applied in r811994. Yegor