php-excel is a really simple library class written in PHP to dump an array of data into an Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice Calc readable format. This is version 2 of the older library still hosted on Google Code at:

http://code.google.com/p/php-excel

The class is inspired by the MySQL Query tool which offers a simple extraction of database tables into Microsoft's Open XML format. However, I was always looking for a way to do this in an app or a website with some data which belongs in a table.

The function is simple: You generate an array - even a larger array, dump it into the class and select whether you want to write it into an excel-readable file or send this file directly to your browser.

It can not deal with complex operations or layouts. If you like to design your tabular data using colors or font-styles or if you want the excel file to contain formulas, you better use a much more sophisticated export library. I recommend using the beautiful:

http://www.codeplex.com/PHPExcel/

... which is far more capable of such things.

The usage is very, very simple. Here's the script for adding a simple array to the php-excel library and sending the file to the browser (for downloading):

See test.php for more details.