Maarten Balliauw has made a new blog post today about a method he's using to help reuse some of the business logic that Excel spreadsheets can have in a PHP script with help from PHPExcel.

In many companies, business logic resides in Excel. This business logic is sometimes created by business analysts and sometimes by business users who want to automate parts of their everyday job using Excel. [...] Did you know you can use PHPExcel to take advantage of the Excel-based business logic without having to worry about duplicate business logic?

He creates a quick example of a script that can take in an Excal file and pull it into a PHPExcel object, ready for manipulation. He fills in values for the already defined fields (like "carColor" or "leatherSeats") and uses the getCalculatedValue method to perform the action on the cell. The output is dropped into a variable that can be echoed out or used later on in the PHP script.

Wrapping up their series on "Seperating logic from presentation", DevShed has posted this final article capping off the creation of a simple template parser in PHP5.

If you haven't read up on them yet, go back and check out part one and part two of the series to catch up. They'll give you the foundation to build from - not just the code but the concepts as well. This third part demonstrates chunked caching of your templates/pages as well as pulling in more than one template file at a time. Throw that all together with the functionality from before and you have an extensible, simple template parsing class they use in a bit more concrete example.