The goal of the Standard PHP Library-or SPL, in brief-is to provide a standard library of interfaces which allows developers to take full advantage of object-oriented programming in PHP 5.
This library of interfaces creates a standard API for certain kinds of built-in functionality, allowing your classes to interact with the PHP engine in a much more seamless manner. The functionality it provides includes, (for example) is the ability to define how your objects will react when iterated over for each, advanced array access, file and directory access, and advanced SimpleXML object handling.
For today’s web designer or developer, MS Office Files are becoming nearly non-utilized.They are usually not required within creating one and, if needed, there are web apps for that.
However, for web apps which host large amounts of information, they enable users to import/export them, and the data is a huge time-saver and Excel (XLS, CVS) files are the most popular format for that job.
For standard content, we can always export it as a HTML file but, depending on the audience, providing Word files can be a better option. For PHP developers, working with MS Office files (Excel, Word and Powerpoint in this case) it is quite simplified with the help of mature libraries which exist out there.
In the spirit of reusing the wheel instead of reinventing it, here are eight free web libraries which you can use in your next program which will dramatically increase your efficiency.
Enjoy !
1. PHP PowerPoint
This PHP library makes it easy and possible for users to create a presentation, add slides to it (including test and images), format them and more. The presentation can be exported as a PowerPoint 2007 (presentationML) or PHPPowerPoint Serialized Spreadsheet file. It has numerous number of feauters such as supports different fonts and font styles, supports formatting, styles, support rich text strings and many more.
2. PHP Word
PHPWord is a library written in PHP that create word documents. No Windows operating system is needed for usage because the result are docx files (Office Open XML) that can be opened by all major office software. PHPWord is based on the fantastic PHPExcel/PHPPowerPoint libraries. It allows users to insert text breaks, insert page breaks, insert and format document sections, header/footer and many more.
3. PHP Excel Reader
This PHP library is only for parsing and retrieving data from XLS files. It allows targeting any specific cells, counting number of rows and format the output (alignment, colors, borders, etc.).
4. Excel Writer (XML) for PHP
Set of classes for PHP that allow Excel XML files to be generated dynamically. Nearly a full implementation of the MS XML architecture. Besides the initial Excel document, it can create sheets and style the output.
5. PHP Export Data
A simple library for exporting tabular data to Excel-friendly XML, CSV, or TSV. It supports streaming exported data to a file or directly to the browser as a download so it is suitable for exporting large datasets (you won’t run out of memory).
Download Here
6. PHP Excel
Download Here
Php-excel aims to be the most simple and lightweight approach to convert a matrix-like, two-dimensional array from PHP to Microsoft Excel.
7. PHPExcel
A full-featured PHP library for handling and creating Excel files which can read from many different spreadsheet file formats like Excel (.xls), Excel 2007 (OfficeOpenXML -.xlsx), CSV, Libre/OpenOffice Calc .ods, PDF, HTML, etc.
It has support for setting any meta data of spreadsheets (author, title.), adding worksheets/rows/columns, merging cells, manipulating formulas, formatting and much more.
