Exporting Dynamic Results to Excel

[Anon]

I'M ABOUT TO GO CRAZY! Everything I read says I should be able to export my dynamically generated HTML table to Excel by simply putting <b>header("Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel");</b> as the first output of the script followed by the HTML table. I CANNOT GET IT TO WORK! All it does is whir for a while and then launches Excel with a "Timeout error" within the cells (rather than my expected data).

However, I CAN make it work if I hard code the HTML table (or copy and paste my dynamic table) after the Content-Type statement -- that works great. Why won't it work with my dynamically generated table on the fly?

(Windows 2000 Pro, IE 5.5 w/ SP 2, PHP 4)

[Anon]

I don't think it's as complex as you are
making it. Though I've never done it in
PHP, the way I've done it in perl is to
set the header (like you mentioned before)
and send the output to the browser much like
it'd expect with a CSV delimited file. I've
used "tabs" to force the columns, and I think
I've also used "spaces" as well. When a row
is complete, write the newline character to
the browser and then go onto the next row.
When done, close output.

You should only need to make html when it's a browser that's rendering the output.
Since a browser will just hand this MIME
type off to another DLL (that it has to know
to call) to display it, it's not the
browsers ability to display the data.