Read and write Office documents from Clojure
Docjure makes reading and writing Office Excel spreadsheet documents
in Clojure easy.
Docjure is aimed at making the basic use case of reading and writing
spreadsheets easy.
If you need advanced charting, pivot tables etc., the easiest way is
to build template spreadsheets with Excel and populate them with
Docjure.
If you want to manipulate advanced features programatically,
you are probably better off using the underlying Apache POI
spreadsheet library directly or looking for another tool.
Docjure has low churn. It is very stable library with a history going
back to 2009 (open-sourced in 2010).
The complete documentation is available on cljdoc.
(use 'dk.ative.docjure.spreadsheet);; Load a spreadsheet and read the first two columns from the;; price list sheet:(->> (load-workbook "spreadsheet.xlsx")(select-sheet "Price List")(select-columns {:A :name, :B :price}));=> [{:name "Foo Widget", :price 100}, {:name "Bar Widget", :price 200}]
If you want to read a single cell value, you can use the select-cell function which
takes an Excel-style cell reference (A2) and returns the cell. In order to get the
actual value, use read-cell
(use 'dk.ative.docjure.spreadsheet)(read-cell(->> (load-workbook "spreadsheet.xlsx")(select-sheet "Price List")(select-cell "A1")))
This example loads a workbook from a named file. In the case of running
in the application server, the file typically resides in the resources directory,
and it’s not on the caller’s path. To cover this scenario, we provide
the function ‘load-workbook-from-resource’ that takes a named resource
as the parameter. After a minor modification, the same example will look like:
(->> (load-workbook-from-resource "spreadsheet.xlsx")(select-sheet "Price List")(select-columns {:A :name, :B :price}))
The function ‘load-workbook’ is a multimethod, and the first example takes
a file name as a parameter. The overloaded version of ‘load-workbook’
takes an InputStream. This may be useful when uploading a workbook to the server
over HTTP connection as multipart form data. In this case, the web framework
passes a byte buffer, and the example should be modified as (note that you have
to use ‘with-open’ to ensure that the stream will be closed):
(with-open [stream (clojure.java.io/input-stream bytes)](->> (load-workbook stream)(select-sheet "Price List")(select-columns {:A :name, :B :price})))
This example creates a spreadsheet with a single sheet named “Price List”.
It has three rows. We apply a style of yellow background colour and bold font
to the top header row, then save the spreadsheet.
(use 'dk.ative.docjure.spreadsheet);; Create a spreadsheet and save it(let [wb (create-workbook "Price List"[["Name" "Price"]["Foo Widget" 100]["Bar Widget" 200]])sheet (select-sheet "Price List" wb)header-row (first (row-seq sheet))](set-row-style! header-row (create-cell-style! wb {:background :yellow,:font {:bold true}}))(save-workbook! "spreadsheet.xlsx" wb))
This example creates a spreadsheet with multiple sheets. Simply add more
sheet-name and data pairs. To create a sheet with no data, pass nil as
the data argument.
(use 'dk.ative.docjure.spreadsheet);; Create a spreadsheet and save it(let [wb (create-workbook "Squares"[["N" "N^2"][1 1][2 4][3 9]]"Cubes"[["N" "N^3"][1 1][2 8][3 27]])](save-workbook! "exponents.xlsx" wb))
Docjure allows you not only to evaluate a formula cell in a speadsheet, it also
provides a way of exposing a formula in a cell as a Clojure function using thecell-fn function.
(use 'dk.ative.docjure.spreadsheet);; Load a speadsheet and take the first sheet, construct a function from cell A2, taking;; A1 as input.(def formula-from-a2 (cell-fn "A2"(first (sheet-seq (load-workbook "spreadsheet.xlsx")))"A1"));; Returns value of cell A2, as if value in cell A1 were 1.0(formula-from-a2 1.0)
If the spreadsheet being read contains cells with errors the default
behaviour of the library is to return a keyword representing the
error as the cell value.
For example, given a spreadsheet with errors:
(use 'dk.ative.docjure.spreadsheet)(def sample-cells (->> (load-workbook "spreadsheet.xlsx")(sheet-seq)(mapcat cell-seq)))sample-cells;=> (#<XSSFCell 15.0> #<XSSFCell NA()> #<XSSFCell 35.0> #<XSSFCell 13/0> #<XSSFCell 33.0> #<XSSFCell 96.0>)
Reading error cells, or cells that evaluate to an error (e.g. divide by
zero) returns a keyword representing the type of error fromread-cell.
(->> sample-cells(map read-cell));=> (15.0 :NA 35.0 :DIV0 33.0 96.0)
How you handle errors will depend on your application. You may want to
replace specific errors with a default value and remove others for
example:
(->> sample-cells(map read-cell)(replace {:DIV0 0.0})(remove keyword?));=> (15.0 35.0 0.0 33.0 96.0)
The following is a list of all possible error values:
#{:VALUE :DIV0 :CIRCULAR_REF :REF :NUM :NULL :FUNCTION_NOT_IMPLEMENTED :NAME :NA}
It’s worth understanding a bit about the underlying structure of a spreadsheet before you
start iterating over the contents.
Spreadsheets are designed to be sparse - not all rows in the spreadsheet must physically exist,
and not all cells in a row must physically exist. This is how you can create data at ZZ:65535 without
using huge amounts of storage.
Thus each cell can be in 3 states - with data, blank, or nonexistent (null). There’s a special type CellType.BLANK for blank cells, but missing cells are just returned as nil.
Similarly rows can exist with cells, or exist but be empty, or they can not exist at all.
Prior to Docjure 1.11 the iteration functions wrapped the underlying Apache POI iterators, which skipped over missing data - this could cause surprising behaviour, especially when there were missing cells inside tabular data.
Since Docjure 1.11 iteration now returns nil values for missing rows and cells - this is a breaking change - any code that calls row-seq or cell-seq now needs to deal with possible nil values.
You can iterate over all the rows in a worksheet with row-seq:
(->> (load-workbook "test.xls")(select-sheet "first")row-seq)
This will return a sequence of org.apache.poi.usermodel.Row objects, or nil for any missing rows. You can use (remove nil? (row-seq ...) ) if you are happy to ignore missing rows, but then be aware the nth result in the sequence might not match the nth row in the spreadsheet.
You can iterate over all the cells in a row with cell-seq - this returns a sequence of org.apache.poi.usermodel.Cell objects, or nil for missing cells. Note that (read-cell nil) returns nil so it’s safe to apply read-cell to the results of cell-seq
(->> (load-workbook "test.xls")(select-sheet "first")row-seq(remove nil?)(map cell-seq)(map #(map read-cell %)))
For example, if you run the above snippet on a sparse spreadsheet like:
| First Name | Middle Name | Last Name |
|---|---|---|
| Edger | Allen | Poe |
(missing row) |
||
| John | (missing) |
Smith |
Then it will return:
(("First Name" "Middle Name" "Last Name")("Edger" "Allen" "Poe")("John" nil "Smith"))
You can adjust the column widths to they fit the contents.
This makes generated workbooks look nicer.
For example, to auto-size all the columns in all the sheets
in a workbook, use this:
;; wb is a workbook(dorun (for [sheet (sheet-seq wb)](auto-size-all-columns! sheet)))
To apply auto-width to individual columns in a sheet, use theauto-size-column! function.
The Docjure jar is distributed on
Clojars. Here you can find both
release builds and snapshot builds of pre-release versions.
If you are using the Leiningen build tool just add this line to the:dependencies list in project.clj to use it:
[dk.ative/docjure "1.21.0"]
(defproject some.cool/project "1.0.0-SNAPSHOT":description "Spreadsheet magic using Docjure":dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.12.0"][dk.ative/docjure "1.21.0"]])
deps.edn with the Clojure CLITo add Docjure to a project using the Clojure CLI tools, add the dependency to your deps.edn file:
{:deps {dk.ative/docjure {:mvn/version "1.21.0"}}}
You need to install the Leiningen build tool to build the library.
You can get it here: Leiningen
The library uses the Apache POI library which will be downloaded by
the “lein deps” command.
Then build the library:
lein depslein compilelein test
To run the tests on all supported Clojure versions use:
lein all test
To check for security issues use:
lein nvd check
To check for new versions of dependencies:
lein ancient
To run the static analysis of the code:
lein clj-kondo
When releasing a version to Clojars you must provide your user-name. The password is a deployment token, not your normal password. You can generate this by logging into Clojars. These tokens have an expiration date so if it does not work, log in a check if you need a new token.
lein deploy clojars
You also need a GPG key to sign the releases.
These also expire, and must be periodically renewed. You can check your keys and their status like this:
gpg --list-keys
See also lein help deploy and lein help gpg.
Remember to tag releases in git. You can list the tags with git tag -n and tag with git tag -a TAGNAME -m 'Tag comment'.
Copyright (c) 2009-2025 Martin Jul
Docjure is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for
the license terms.
Docjure uses the Apache POI library, which is licensed under the
Apache License v2.0.
For more information on Apache POI refer to the
Apache POI web site.
Martin Jul
This library includes great contributions from
Thank you very much!
A special thank you also goes out to people that did not contribute code
but shared their ideas, reported security issues or bugs and otherwise
inspired the continuing work on the project.