On the TotalPHP site there's a new tutorial showing how to pull data from your database and export it as a CSV file that tools like Excel can read in and use.
There are some occasions where you would want to export your site's information in CSV or similar text format. You might want to do this so you can view reports in a spreadsheet, or you might want an export of your product information to upload to a service like Google Products. Either way the method and end result are essentially the same.
The tutorial shows how to grab the information (via the mysqli functionality in PHP5) and formatting each row with the correct values in a certain order. Finally, the entire contents are echoed back out with the correct header() to force a download on the user's browser.