title: Accessing cells of an old excel .xls file with POI
body: <p>I want to parse old .xls Excel file, with only one sheet inside. There are no formulas and if it is no much different than it would be if I were using .csv. I just want the values that are there. How can I access the value inside of a certain cell?</p>
  
  <p>First I tried using POI, I wrote my code to discover the error message:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>org.apache.poi.hssf.OldExcelFormatException: The supplied spreadsheet seems to be Excel 5.0/7.0 (BIFF5) format. POI only supports BIFF8 format (from Excel versions 97/2000/XP/2003)</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>I have read the question <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15336457/how-to-process-old-excel-xls-files-using-poi">How to process old excel .xls files using POI?</a> and I couldn't understand (after reading the documentation) how I read the value on a certain cell. </p>
  
  <p>This was the best I could do:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-java prettyprint-override"><code>private static String extractExcel(File fileEntry) {
      OldExcelExtractor wb = new OldExcelExtractor(fileEntry);
      return wb.getText();
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I had two problems here:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>It returns a string, a cell by line.</li>
  <li>It converts integers to float.</li>
  </ol>