Find Excel Cell by Text in Apache POI

Question

I'd like to find a cell in an Excel sheet by its text. The text is something like %t:

sheet.findCell("%t"); // pseudo-code, not working

My goal is to enable the user to provide kind of template, in which data is written. Colours and fonts, as well as data's position can be configured by the user in an Excel file. This %t cell is the top-left corner of the data table.

Additional question: Is there a more elegant way to get this job done?

EDIT I'm iterating over the rows and cells to find it. I'm afraid it's not really efficient, but it works so far:

public static Cell findCell(XSSFSheet sheet, String text) {     
    for(Row row : sheet) {          
        for(Cell cell : row) {              
            if(text.equals(cell.getStringCellValue()))
                return cell;
        }
    }       
    return null;
}

Answer 1

You can iterate through the cells of the sheet and investigate the contents. I don't think there is an easier method.

Answer 2

Its an old post but still i want to publish my code. You can define a file path.

String inputFile = "src\main\resources\file.xlsx";

XSSFWorkbook xssfWorkbook = new XSSFWorkbook(new FileInputStream(inputFile));
                DataFormatter formatter = new DataFormatter();
                for (XSSFSheet sheet : xssfWorkbook) {
                    for (Row row : sheet) {
                        for (Cell cell : row) {
                            if (formatter.formatCellValue(cell).contains("name")){
                                cell.setCellValue("test");
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
                xssfWorkbook.write(new FileOutputStream(inputFile));