Two things: Apache POI seems to be dormant - they never delivered on their promise to support other formats. The second was that ExtenXLS had fairly good documentation and examples, and just worked. I actually used the OpenXLS download (now at version 6)
Haven’t found a simple free equivalent for Word.
Thanks, I’ll take a look at it meanwhile.
Cool application CommunityNews , will probably include some form of rss feed reader in http://cia.sourceforge.net/.
Mostly to include one feed from Swedish parliament and to test my own rss feeds 
Pether
Glad to see you enjoyed it, Pether! Hope it’ll give you a head start in your project!
/Jonatan