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.