PHP - EXCEL

[we_win]

I want to generate an excel spread sheet using PHP Script. I have all the required data with me, i have to put it in an excel spreadsheet using a PHP script. Any Suggestions ?????

[Anon]

Depends... do you want it to be visible to Windows & Linux/Whatever boxes?

If all you need is Windows, then you can simply set the header to make it a excel file and Excel will convert your HTML to its own format.

header ("Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel");

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However, if you want to generate an excel file for use by any Excel compatable program (Gnumeric), then you'll need to output some binary I think. However, I've seen a couple PHP classes that handle the hard part and make it pretty easy. Try searching google.

[Anon]

Along with the Content-Type: header declaration that Thomas Reynolds suggests, one straightforward method of writing spreadsheet data (that is also cross-platform) is to output it as a CSV file - that'd just be plain text with a .csv extension (use Excel to save one off and open it in a text editor to see what I mean - that'd be faster than explaining it here).

To specify the extension (so's it doesn't get saved as something.php and requiring naming it back to something.csv by hand) the header is

Content-Disposition: [disposition]; filename=$filename.csv

Where [disposition] is either:
inline (for displaying in the browser (at least, that's what IE/Excel would do)), or
attachment (for download/saving).