30 Top Excel PHP Classes

Contents

Why Excel?

Why Excel and PHP?

Top Excel PHP Classes

PHP Excel Reader classes

PHP Excel Writer classes

PHP Excel Import classes

PHP Excel Export classes

PHP Excel Reader and Writer classes

Special PHP Excel Classes

Why Excel?

Excel is a well known spreadsheet editor program since almost 30 years ago when Microsoft released it for Mac OS and Windows.

It is often used by individuals and businesses as a poor man's database. Even though Microsoft also provides Microsoft Access as part of their Office suite along Excel, most lay man users still prefer to use Excel as if it is database with records and columns, as it is simpler to use and understand than real database programs.

Even though there are free alternatives to Microsoft Excel, those never got as popular because most Excel users got so used to the Excel way of working, that they prefer to stick to something that is more reliable from their viewpoint.

Why Excel and PHP?

Excel is used by so many businesses that many Web sites import or export data in tabular format support popular spreadsheet formats like Excel's and CSV.

Therefore it is natural that there is such a high demand for PHP components that manipulate spreadsheet files in formats supported by Excel.

The recently released PHP package recommendations system made that fact even more evident. The keywords used in many of the requests are directly or indirectly related with Excel. Those keywords are for instance: xls file import to db, excel docx pdf, write excel, parse csv list and send mail, report, etc..

Top Excel PHP Classes

Over time PHP Classes received many classes that manipulate files in Excel formats. This includes not only the old Excel binary format (.XLS), the newer versions based in XML (.XLSX), and comma (or tab) separated value files (.CSV).

It is not possible to list all available Excel files because they are so many and some are very similar to others. So here it is only listed some of the best or unusual classes related to Excel. Some classes were left out of this list for requiring packages that were not available this site.

The listed classes were grouped according to their purpose.

PHP Excel Reader classes

1. Read Excel Spreadsheets using COM

Umesh Rai (India)

2. Read Excel Binary .XLS Files in Pure PHP

Ruslan V. Uss (Russian Federation)

3. Read Excel Spreadsheets using ODBC

khalil Majdalawi (Jordan)

4. Read Excel Worksheets in XML format (.XLSX)

Andrew Aculana (Phillippines)

5. Read Simple Excel XML files (.XLSX)

Sergey Shuchkin (Russian Federation)

6. Read Excel generated CSV files

Ben Vautier (Australia)

PHP Excel Writer classes

7. Write Excel Binary file (.XLS) from Array data

Sergey Sergeevich (Russian Federation)

8. Generate Excel files using templates

Skrol29 (France)

9. Write Excel XML (.XLSX) files

Harish Chauhan (India)

10. Write Excel-compatible CSV files in pure PHP

H. Poort (The Nederlands)

11. Write Excel binary files (.XLS) based on Perl ExcelWriter

PHP Excel Import classes

12. Import Excel cells pasted as CSV in a form input

Gianluca Zanferrari (Italy)

13. Import data from MySQL to Excel

Harish Chauhan (India)

14. Import MySQL database table records into binary Excel file (.XLS)

15. Import data from MySQL to Excel HTML

raju mazumder (Bangladesh)

16. Import data from MySQL to Excel Sheets and Charts

Rafael de Pablo (Spain)

17. Import data from MySQL and serve Excel file for download

Erh-Wen, Kuo (United States)

18. Import MySQL table columns into Excel XML file (.XLSX)

Gianluca Zanferrari (Italy)

19. Import MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and SQL Server database tables into Excel files

enri_pin (Greece)

PHP Excel Export classes

20. Export data from Excel to JSON format

Karl Holz (Canada)

PHP Excel Reader and Writer classes

21. Read and write Excel binary (.XLS) or XML (.XLS) or CVS files

22. Manipulate Excel spreadsheet files in XML format

23. Modify Excel spreadsheet files in XML format (.XLSX)

Ilya Eliseev (Russian Federation)

24. Manipulate Excel spreadsheet files using COM objects

Alain Samoun

Special PHP Excel Classes

25. Reading and writing Excel files as if they were files using a stream handler

Ignatius Teo (Australia)

26. Excel MROUND function

Steve Winnington (United Kingdom)

27. Excel Financial Functions

Enrique Garcia M. (Colombia)

28. Indexing Excel and other file types for searching with Lucene

Giampaolo Losito (Italy)

29. Retrieve Application Internationalization Texts from Excel files

Johan Barbier (France)

30. To be Submitted by You

This one was not yet published because you did not submit it. Excel continues to be a popular application, so many more top Excel classes will be published in the PHP Classes in the future.

Make sure you submit innovative classes that do things that are useful but at the same time are different from the other available on the site. This way you can be nominated to the PHP Programming Innovation Award and earn prizes and recognition for your innovative work.

Please post a comment to tell what you think about these classes or request that somebody develops a PHP Excel class for an innovative purpose.