Creating Excel spreadsheet on the fly with PHP

Question

I'm creating Excel files in a PHP project. Those files aren't just CSV data... They are multiple tabs spreadsheets with functions and formatting.

So far I'm using the Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer class that is provided with Pear.

Everything is fine but our users don't like 2 things:

1. When they open those files generated by PHP, modify them with Excel and save those changes, Excel ask to upgrade the file format because it was saved to version 5.0/95.
2. Files are way too large because of the embedded images. As far as I know the only way to add images with Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer is with insertBitmap which add 24 bit bitmaps to the document.

I would like to address those issues. I'm pretty sure #1 can't be done as you can see there. But is there a way to add compressed images (jpeg) to the document?

If it's not possible to modify Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer to meet my needs, what are your class recommendations for this? Searching questions here leaded me to PHPExcel. Are there any other good alternatives out there?

If possible I would like to stick with Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer because changing to another class would be much more work (those generated spreadsheets are quite complex).

I'm using PHP 5.2.9.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I've done this with PHP using XML for the spreadsheets. Check out this link for the XML spreadsheet: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa140066(office.10).aspx and http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2006/12/10/images-in-open-xml-documents.aspx for inserting images.

Answer 2

I ended up using PHPExcel. With this class I can avoid point #1 since I can save in may formats (including Excel 2003/2007). For point #2 it's possible and PHPExcel do this already. When you chose the old Excel format, PHPExcel extends Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer in order to save the file.

It was a pain to rewrite my the code to use the new class but it was worth it since PHPExcel is really nice.