New on his blog today Pablo Viquez has this post looking at code that will let your Zend Framework applications export to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (via the Spreadsheet Excel Writer PEAR component).

Last week, I had to allow the user to export a given report into an MS Excel file format. The application uses Zend Framework 1.9.1 and so far ZF does not support for "Office" formats, so after searching for a nice implementation, I found a PEAR module called Spreadsheet Excel Writter, which looked pretty good, it had very good documentation and the code was clean and well structured so I wanted I give it a shot.

He lays out the structure of the sample application and, using a context switch on the request, he creates a controller that responds to the "/report" by calling a special model/view combination that uses the PEAR package to push out the custom "report.xls" file.