Communicating via COM in PHP is easy as ever; especially for people coming from a VB background where executing complex tasks in MS-applications is a piece of cake, you will feel right at home in PHP. In fact, VB COM calls can be converted to PHP COM calls in just a few simple search and replaces.

He shows how to use the COM extension in a (Windows) PHP installation to access the text inside the document and manipulate the contents however you'd like (even writing them back out to another Word file).

He uses the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer package to create the file without the need for getting COM in the mix. The package makes it simple to take in a dataset and write it out to a workbook - complete with column headers.

He shows two ways to save the file as well - creating a local file (on the web server) and pushing it out to the browser.

It's a simple introduction, but it's a starting place - especially for those with a project plan that requires it.]]> Tue, 28 Mar 2006 07:01:46 -0600