Lets say I use PHP to assemble a table of figures, some stored in a database and others calculated onto a page. Can I export these figures and calculations “as is” to Excel?
Kind of like this:
year 2007 2008 2009 2010
procedures 100 150 160 200
units 22 30 36 40
you can try with Pear Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer ( Package for generating Excel spreadsheets (.xls) )
Take a look at the detail description here
http://swarajketan.com/2010/06/26/generating-excel-spreadsheets-with-php-and-pear/
You can also use PHP to generate CSV files instead of HTML pages simply by using:
header('Content-type: text/comma-separated-values');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="somefilename.csv"');
and then echoing the data with the necessary commas in between.
That will automatically offer the file for download rather than writing the output to a file on the server and if you select Open instead of Save then it will import itself directly into Excel.
I found that to be the easiest way of allowing visitors to a site to extract data directly into Excel without the need to save any files on the server in order to offer them for download.
There’s also PHPExcel.
fputcsv()
Excel understands CSV’s.