neylitalo Posted July 17, 2007 Share Posted July 17, 2007 With the PEAR Spreadsheet::Excel::Writer class, you can write Excel 5 (Excel 97) files, but Excel 5 had a nasty little restriction on the lengths of the values in the cells. Each cell has a maximum content length of 255 characters, not even near to the amount of data I need to store. So, my question for all of you: Have you used, seen, or heard of a PHP library that supports writing to Excel files greater than Excel 5? Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/60409-write-excel5-files-with-php/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
ober Posted July 17, 2007 Share Posted July 17, 2007 I'm guessing Excel isn't installed on the server? If it is, you can use COM objects to deal with the files in whatever version is installed on the server. Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/60409-write-excel5-files-with-php/#findComment-300506 Share on other sites More sharing options...
neylitalo Posted July 17, 2007 Author Share Posted July 17, 2007 No, it's a Unix server, so that's out... (good idea, though) and I suppose I should have mentioned that I'm creating these Excel files from scratch, with information right out of a database. I've got next to no experience with COM, so I don't know if you can create new files with it. Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/60409-write-excel5-files-with-php/#findComment-300507 Share on other sites More sharing options...
zq29 Posted July 17, 2007 Share Posted July 17, 2007 Are you utilising some of Excels advanced functionality, where a csv wouldn't suffice? Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/60409-write-excel5-files-with-php/#findComment-300523 Share on other sites More sharing options...
ober Posted July 17, 2007 Share Posted July 17, 2007 Also, can you split the data so it's in 255 char chunks and use multiple cells to represent the data? I guess I'm curious about what kind of data you're storing that's more than 255 chars per cell. Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/60409-write-excel5-files-with-php/#findComment-300528 Share on other sites More sharing options...
neylitalo Posted July 18, 2007 Author Share Posted July 18, 2007 Are you utilising some of Excels advanced functionality, where a csv wouldn't suffice? A CSV would indeed work, I'll look into that. Also, can you split the data so it's in 255 char chunks and use multiple cells to represent the data? I guess I'm curious about what kind of data you're storing that's more than 255 chars per cell. Well, it can't really be split up - the data is from an electronic time-card system. Employees enter the amount of time spent on a particular task, an outline of the task, and the customer the task was for. For most employees, each "task" is a complete description of several hours spent at one of the many firms we do IT consulting for, so there are as many as twenty line-items; the largest description I've seen yet is just under 800 characters. This particular module is for invoicing and records - at the end of the month, the accounting staff runs a report on the different clients and the work performed for them, and it spits out an Excel document - for what purpose, I don't know. The bottom line is that they're using Excel, I'm sure the CSV will work. Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/60409-write-excel5-files-with-php/#findComment-300784 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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