Here is a very nice utility for processing Excel tables in Java with an annotation-based approach: the yava Excel stripper.  all that you will require to give this functionality a test run is Excel file, the yava-excel-stripper library, and the Apache POI library of your choice. This tutorial has plenty of code snippets to illustrate, and it covers how to read string columns, non-string columns as well as handling custom conversion when internal conversion fails. This is another what I would call longtail solutions that are contained within the incredibly complex code.google.com website. You may already be aware of this library if you are a Java developer but I thought it was worth posting anyway.