The tutorials here are very helpful and well-written. They use an external JAR developed by the Apache POI project.
Here’s an simple example of editing one cell:
InputStream inp = new FileInputStream("wb.xls");
Workbook wb = WorkbookFactory.create(inp);
Sheet sheet = wb.getSheetAt([sheet index]);
Row row = sheet.getRow([row index]);
Cell cell = row.getCell([cell index]);
String cellContents = cell.getStringCellValue();
//Modify the cellContents here
// Write the output to a file
cell.setCellValue(cellContents);
FileOutputStream fileOut = new FileOutputStream("wb.xls");
wb.write(fileOut);
fileOut.close();
Hope it helps