Reading from a text file is common. But, reading from an excel(.xls) file is not. Recently, I got to do so. Little bit Google search and experimentation resulted in the following. I used HSSF from Apache-POI. import org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.HSSFSheet; import org.apache.poi.hssf.usermodel.HSSFWorkbook; import org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.Cell; import org.apache.poi.ss.usermodel.Row; public void readFromXlsFile (String pathToFile, String sheetName){ try { FileInputStream file = new FileInputStream(pathToFile); HSSFWorkbook workbook = new HSSFWorkbook(file); HSSFSheet sheet = workbook.getSheet(sheetName); Iterator<Row> rowIterator = sheet.rowIterator(); while (rowIterator.hasNext()) { ...