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.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results of their latest poll conducted over the past week. They asked developers which of the given options was the best feature of the version 1 release of PHPExcel.

Options for this week's poll included "Creating an in-memory spreadsheet representation", "Adding Worksheets to Spreadsheet", and "Setting Spreadsheet Meta Data", but in the end, it was the "None" option that won out with almost thirty percent of the votes. Tied for second, each with 2.4% of the votes were the options "Creating an in-memory spreadsheet representation", "Setting Spreadsheet Meta Data", and "Adding Worksheets to Spreadsheet".

If you'd like to get in on the action for this week's poll, check out the question and answers for the week - which one of the options is your favorite CMS written in PHP. (Options include Drupal, Joomla, and the Dragonfly CMS).

The International PHP Magazine has posted their latest results from this past week's poll. They asked readers to vote on which of the options they wanted most to see in PHPUnit projects.

Tying for first place were the two open-ended options, "All" and "None" - both with 17.8% percent of the votes. Falling down to the next slot was the "Web interface for Test Result Database" option, followed by "Support for Distributed Testing".

Be sure to cast your vote in this week's poll too. They ask you, the reader, to vote which of the features listed is the best that the PHPExcel package has to offer (including "Setting Spreadsheet Meta Data" and "Adding Images to your Spreadsheet").