On NetTuts there's a new tutorial showing how to take data from a MySQL database and translate it into a usable Excel file with the help of some simple PHP.

A CSV (Comma Separated Value) file is usually sufficient for exporting MySQL data as an Excel Spreadsheet. These CSV files are data only though. A real Excel spreadsheet has formatting, formulas and perhaps even graphics - the difference between a simple method of data transfer and a professional report. This tutorial shows how to use open source PHP components to create "real" Excel spreadsheets from MySQL SELECT statements.

With the help of the PHPExcel tool, making Excel-formatted files is a simple process. They show how to label columns, pull data out with a "quick and dirty" SQL statement, formatting the results to something a bit more clean and iterate through the pages of data to push them into the spreadsheet (including formulas). You can download the full source to get everything in one shot.

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.

Juozas Kaziukenas has a new blog post that looks at creating Excel documents on the fly with the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer PEAR package.

In one of my projects, we need to send emails to our suppliers with new orders as Excel spreadsheets. We used to do it by hand, but when you have 10 suppliers and you make 200 products orders per week, after some time you are just tired of creating Excel spreadsheets, mailing them and so on. So, my task was to implement automatic spreadsheets creation with PHP.

His example creates a basic file with a set of "Items", some formatting and a set of code/title items to fill out each row. The end result can then be packaged up and sent out as a complete Excel XLS file.

Maarten Balliauw has written up a guide to saving the output of your PHPExcel applications out to the Documents service that Google offers.

As you may know, PHPExcel is built using an extensible model, supporting different input and output formats. The PHPExcel core class library features a spreadsheet engine, which is supported by IReader and IWriter instances used for reading and writing a spreadsheet to/from a file. Currently, PHPExcel supports writers for Excel2007, Excel5 (Excel 97+), CSV, HTML and PDF. Wouldnt it be nice if we could use PHPExcel to store a spreadsheet on Google Documents? Let's combine some technologies.

The two technologies in question are a standard install of the PHPExcel library and the Zend Framework (with its Zend_Gdata component). Using the component, a save() method is created and hooked into the IWriter interface of PHPExcel. When this save method is called, the Zend_Gdata component connects to the Documents service and uploads the resulting information for the account you supply.

On the Zend Developer Zone, Vikram Vaswani has posted a tutorial that shows hos to "break the language barrier" between PHP and Microsoft's Excel to allow for the reading and writing of spreadsheet data directly from one to the other.

When it comes to playing nice with data in different formats, PHP's pedigree is hard to beat. Not only does the language make it a breeze to deal with SQL result sets and XML files, but it comes with extensions to deal with formats as diverse as Ogg/Vorbis audio files, ZIP archives and EXIF headers. So it should come as no surprise that PHP can also read and write Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, albeit with a little help from PEAR.

After grabbing the different parts needed (the PHP-ExcelReader package and the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer PEAR package, he shows how to create a simple spreadsheet with just numeric information in it. For something a bit more interesting, he goes the other way and shows spreadsheet data as an HTML table.

Other examples included as well are things like: pushing spreadsheet data into a database, working with formulas and styling it to your liking.

Akash Mehta has pointed out five "PEAR gems" that can help you get your code up and running faster - some helpful bits of code to help you deal with some common issues.

Sifting through the repository is also a challenge; a basic category system is in place, but it's hard to tell what you want when you don't know what's available. Here are some gems from the PEAR repository that you could really find useful.

The five that made his list are:

• Service_Akismet
• HTTP_Request
• Archive_Tar
• Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer
• XML_Parser

Danne Lundqvist has posted about the process he went through when developing a solution to create Excel files in PHP:

I'm on this project at work where we need to create an excel file and send it via email or ftp to a recipient. The normal answer to this is to create a comma separated file and name it .xls and excel will work it out. However, that only works if you open it directly through an http request and are able to set the http headers correctly.

To get around these limitations, he found two solutions (thanks Google!) in PEAR's Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer and an MS-Excel Stream Handler class. He includes code that gives an example of another solution, one that packs data into a binary string and returns it as a part of the Excel document.