PHP Script to Convert Excel (.xls) to MySQL Table?

suttercain

Hi everyone,

I had posted a similar question on another board and got mixed responses.

What I need to do is allow a user to upload a .xls file from their computer, via form, and have the rows/columns inserted into a MySQL table. All the excel files will be identical and the information will be appending the data.

I know how to convert .csv files to MySQL and that is not what I need. I need the actual excel file to be included into the database.

I know third part programs like Navicat can do this, but I need it web based and also once I get this going, I eventually need to it dissect specific worksheets within the excel file and place certain columns and rows into specific tables.

So this is where I am starting... convert .xls to mysql with nothing more than a php script.

Thanks.

dagon

why cant you ask the user to save the file as csv (excel has this option) before uploading.

suttercain

Hi Dagon,

Good question. The reason we can't have the user save it as a CSV is because we have 5 worksheets within that single .xls file. The end user would now have to save each worksheet separately and then upload five files instead of one. The people uploading the excel file already have a hard time doing the single file upload... having to open, save as five times, then upload five files would cripple them even further.

What about a PERL module?

http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/059652708X/I_059652708X_CHP_10_SECT_39

dagon

Im suer i have seen a project like this in php, just not sure where, sorry to be next to useless.

Roger_Ramjet

If you are running php on a windows server then you can use .NET and COM.

If you are using Office 2003+ then you can use the XML functionality to save the spreadsheet as an XML spreadsheet - still works exactly the same as the original XLS spreadsheet but is now available to the various PHP XML parsers and functions.

Otherwise there are loads of projects for this on sourceforge.net