Re: [PHP] PHP code to write excel spread*** with multiple workbooks

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Mary Anderson
<maryfran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi all,
I have a linux based web app which prints an html screen of results.
My users really want Excel spreadsheets with the same results. There
is a PEAR application which does this, but from the PEAR description it
seems to be pretty buggy (65 open bugs, average days open 616 days) and
dated.

My spreadsheets will be somewhat simple. They will have multiple
workbooks and could be as large as 10000 rows spread out over 100
workbooks (Bigger than the code can handle, according to one of the open
bug reports). No colors, no formulas, no hyperlinks.

I've checked the archives and found an example which shows me how to
write the results of an SQL (MySQL, I am using postresql, but the
example will still work) into a very simple Excel spread*** with just
one table of results. Is there a way to get a php program to generate a
spread*** with multiple workbooks?


There is an XML format that Microsoft has documented that will do
multi-workbook spreadsheets in Excel. (You can get an idea by saving
an existing spread*** as XML and looking at the source.) I haven't
used any libraries like PEAR to build them, but it isn't too difficult
to write with the basic PHP XML libraries like XMLWriter or DOM.

Andrew
.