There are a number of ways to read an excelsheet from Java. JExcel is one of them.
JExcel API is an opensource Java API which enables developers to read, write and edit excelsheet dynamically in a platform independent way. One good thing about JExcel is that it has no dependencies on any third party libraries. Below is an example code to read an excelsheet from java using JExcel.

import jxl.*;
import java.io.*;
publicclass ReadExcel {
 privatevoid readExcelSheet(String destFile){ 
      File excelSheet = null;
      Workbook workbook = null;    
           
        try {
             Workbook wb = Workbook.getWorkbook(new File(destFile));
             System.out.println(wb.getNumberOfSheets())
                for(int sheetNo=0; sheetNo<wb.getNumberOfSheets();sheetNo++)
                {                
                  Sheet sheet = wb.getSheet(sheetNo);
                  int columns = sheet.getColumns();
                  int rows = sheet.getRows();
                  String data;
                  System.out.println("Sheet Name\t"+wb.getSheet(sheetNo).getName());
                          for(int row = 0;row < rows;row++) {
                              for(int col = 0;col < columns;col++) {
                               data = sheet.getCell(col, row).getContents();
                              System.out.print(data+ " ");
                            
                          }                          
                          System.out.println("\n");
                      }
                      }
                  } catch(Exception ioe) {
                       ioe.printStackTrace();
                  }
             
          }
      publicstaticvoid main(String arg[]){
            ReadExcel excel = new ReadExcel();
            excel.readExcelSheet("C://Employee.xls");
      }
}