Re: PHP code to write excel spreadsheet with multiple workbooks

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Mary Anderson <maryfran@demog.berkeley.edu> wrote: > Hi all, > I have a linux based web app which prints an html screen of results. > My users really want Excel spreadsheets with the same results. There > is a PEAR application which does this, but from the PEAR description it > seems to be pretty buggy (65 open bugs, average days open 616 days) and > dated. > > My spreadsheets will be somewhat simple. They will have multiple > workbooks and could be as large as 10000 rows spread out over 100 > workbooks (Bigger than the code can handle, according to one of the open > bug reports). No colors, no formulas, no hyperlinks. > > I've checked the archives and found an example which shows me how to > write the results of an SQL (MySQL, I am using postresql, but the > example will still work) into a very simple Excel spreadsheet with just > one table of results. Is there a way to get a php program to generate a > spreadsheet with multiple workbooks? > There is an XML format that Microsoft has documented that will do multi-workbook spreadsheets in Excel. (You can get an idea by saving an existing spreadsheet as XML and looking at the source.) I haven't used any libraries like PEAR to build them, but it isn't too difficult to write with the basic PHP XML libraries like XMLWriter or DOM. Andrew