PHP:Writing to excel file using PEAR

Question

I have installed PEAR, Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer and OLE. The sample program is executed successfully but when I try to read the file it shows garbage values. I also tried $workbook->setVersion(8); and $worksheet->setInputEncoding('UTF-8');

I am using this tutorial and Google lot for this problem.
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/getting-started-with-pear/3/

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I try to use PEAR only when I really need to...you can easily generate an excel spreadsheet( assuming it's just data) with something like this:

$header = "Last Name\tFirst Name\tAge\tJob\n"; // new line is start of new row, tab is next column

//ideally you would get this from a DB and just loop through it and append on
$row1 = "Smith\tBob\t25\tManager\n";
$row2 = "Anderson\tTrent\t32\tCEO\n";

$excel = $header.$row1.$row2;

$xlsfile = "excel_example".date("m-d-Y-hiA").".xls";
header('Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel');
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$xlsfile");
echo $excel;

Answer 2

that's just a tab seperated value file though and you're sending headers suggesting the browser treat that data as an excel file. so there's no formatting of data which the poster may require.