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.