The Apache POI project is pleased to announce the release of POI 3.16-beta1. 
Featured are a handful of new areas of functionality, and numerous bug fixes.

See the downloads page for binary and source distributions: https://poi.apache.org/download.html

Release Notes 

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

* Initial work on adding a Gradle build, the Ant based build is currently still the official buildsystem, but there are plans to replace this with Gradle in the future.
* Add support for mixed-length cipher/hashes in password protected files typically used by Office for Mac
* Improve support for reading VBA macros
* Examples to encrypt temp files in SXSSF

A full list of changes is available in the change log: https://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-3.16-beta1-20161120.zip or poi-bin-3.16-beta1-20161120.tar.gz)
 - source archive you can build POI from (poi-src-3.16-beta1-20161120.zip or poi-src-3.16-beta1-20161120.tar.gz)
  Unpack the archive and use the following command to build all POI components with Apache Ant 1.8+ and JDK 1.6 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 "3.16-beta1"

All release artifacts are accompanied by MD5 checksums and 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 
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/poi/tags/REL_3_16_BETA1/KEYS

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, Word,
Visio, Publisher and Outlook. It supports both the older (OLE2) and
new (OOXML - Office Open XML) formats.

See https://poi.apache.org/ for more details