Re: Excel Spreadsheets and PHP

On 19-2-2010 21:28, Ian Robertson wrote:

Hello, everyone. Just a quick question. What are you using, if anything, to create Excel spreadsheets with PHP? Thank you in advance. Hello Ian,

You can use the PHPExcel class. It can read, write and convert between Excel versions without the need of the COM. Depending on the version of the file needs to be, it uses XML or bitbashing. Or, like others said, you can use XML for writing Excel files in the new xlsx format. This is actually a ZIP-file with a lot of XML-files in it. This makes it possible to use other XML techniques as well like Schema, XSL, XPath and DTD. I prefer to make a XML based template and use XSL to transform and parse the data. With PHP you can pass parameters to the XSL file and fill in the blanks where needed. Excel is quite complex due to the cells, the styles, the formulas and the worksheets. Kind regards, Aschwin Wesselius