New from phpBuilder this morning, there's an article about creating Word documents on the fly.

Printing HTML pages directly from browsers usually does not give the best printing output, compared to output from word processors such as Microsoft Word. For web-based systems that generate letters, reports and documents, an output that looks authentic and original is very important.

This article provides a guideline on how to generate documents and letters in MS Word format using a pre-defined template. My customer (a government agency) required for Reminder Letters to be generated automatically in MS Word format from the Loan Management System that I delivered to them.

They show you how, using the COM extension for PHP, to create/modify a Word document. The key is that you place "bookmarks" in the sample Word document for the content, and PHP goes through, using some simple functions, and replaces the content at these bookmarks with your own dynamic content...