i'm not sure what you're wanting to do, but if you're on windows, COM is the easiest option. there is a new COM_DOTNET extension too that's pretty nice, a furthering of the current COM extension.
there is a PEAR class for creating Excel documents without using COM or needing Office installed. it is based on the Perl implementation of same, which is based on this research:
http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~schwartz/pmh/guide.html
it describes the binary structure of Microsoft documents. it is about 7 years old however.
i tried creating a native PHP Word reader/writer based on all of the above, and didn't get that far.
my requirements weren't that extensive, so i ended up just reading in the word document and stripping out everything thing that wasn't an ASCII character i needed...
$ascii = range(32,126);
$ascii[] = 10;
$ascii[] = 13;
$word = file_get_contents('word.doc');
for($i=0;$i<strlen($word);$i++){
if(in_array(ord($word{$i}),$ascii)){
$text .= $word{$i};
}
}
obviously, this only "reads" word docs, it's pretty dang slow, but it worked for my needs.
if the word documents are templates, you could read in the word documents, do a search/replace on the placeholders/bookmarks, and write it back out.
there are also a couple third-party, non-free programs that will create word documents. you could call out to one of these from you PHP scripts.
basically, it sucks working in an enterprise, all-Microsoft shop when you are a PHP developer.
