PHP and excel

sherl100

I want to connect PHP with Ms. Excel worksheet. In the tutorial, it said that I must configure DCOM first. But I didn't found any tutorial about configuring DCOM under Win2k (I use Win2k Professional). Is there anyone can help me? Or is there another way for connecting PHP and Excel?
Please help me.
Thanks.

ahundiak

Do you just want to generate Excel spreadsheets? If so, use the PEAR Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer class.
http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.fileformats.spreadsheet-excel-writer.php

If you really need COM/DCOM (maybe you want to read information from a spreadsheet) then look under the articles on phpbuilder for help on getting started.

sherl100

I want to read some data from the spreadsheet (like tables, etc), then display them in the browser. Someone said that I can use DCOM if it is running under Windows. I have read the article on phpbuilder about it ("Interfacing with COM objects under Windows NT/2k/XP"), but unluckily there are some differences to configure COM under Win2k and WinXP. I don't know how to solve it.
Is there another way for PHP to reading data from excel format?

stolzyboy

you can give excelexplorer a whirl

skate

first up, you don't need DCOM on your server, if you have excel installed, that should be enough.

secondly, the manual covers a way of doing this in the user notes, so i won't go over it here...

lastly, if you open your excel spreadsheet manually, and excel gives you a dialog box of any kind, you could run into problems with excel not being closed from php.

good luck with it tho, it's pretty straight forward...

mr_niceguy

It is not a good idea to access Excel directly in a server environment. Admittedly it is fun to try out accessing Excel or other M$ Office programs through COM just for example but you will notice that there is significant overhead to the whole process and that it is easy to run into problems with Excel generating those error window pop ups.

LordShryku

And since the original question seems to have been thoroughly dodged, you can configure DCom settings by going to Run and typing dcomcnfg or by running dcomcnfg.exe from you system32 directory