Alternative for PHP_excel

Solution 1:

For Writing Excel

• PEAR's PHP_Excel_Writer (xls only)
• php_writeexcel from Bettina Attack (xls only)
• XLS File Generator commercial and xls only
• Excel Writer for PHP from Sourceforge (spreadsheetML only)
• Ilia Alshanetsky's Excel extension now on github (xls and xlsx, and requires commercial libXL component)
• PHP's COM extension (requires a COM enabled spreadsheet program such as MS Excel or OpenOffice Calc running on the server)
• The Open Office alternative to COM (PUNO) (requires Open Office installed on the server with Java support enabled)
• PHP-Export-Data by Eli Dickinson (Writes SpreadsheetML - the Excel 2003 XML format, and CSV)
• Oliver Schwarz's php-excel (SpreadsheetML)
• Oliver Schwarz's original version of php-excel (SpreadsheetML)
• excel_xml (SpreadsheetML, despite its name)... link reported as broken
• The tiny-but-strong (tbs) project includes the OpenTBS tool for creating OfficeOpenXML documents (OpenDocument and OfficeOpenXML formats)
• SimpleExcel Claims to read and write Microsoft Excel XML / CSV / TSV / HTML / JSON / etc formats
• KoolGrid xls spreadsheets only, but also doc and pdf
• PHP_XLSXWriter OfficeOpenXML
• PHP_XLSXWriter_plus OfficeOpenXML, fork of PHP_XLSXWriter
• php_writeexcel xls only (looks like it's based on PEAR SEW)
• spout OfficeOpenXML (xlsx) and CSV
• Slamdunk/php-excel (xls only) looks like an updated version of the old PEAR Spreadsheet Writer

For Reading Excel

• php-spreadsheetreader reads a variety of formats (.xls, .ods and .csv)
• PHP-ExcelReader (xls only)
• PHP_Excel_Reader (xls only)
• PHP_Excel_Reader2 (xls only)
• XLS File Reader Commercial and xls only
• SimpleXLSX From the description it reads xlsx files , though the author constantly refers to xls
• PHP Excel Explorer Commercial and xls only
• Ilia Alshanetsky's Excel extension now on github (xls and xlsx, and requires commercial libXL component)
• PHP's COM extension (requires a COM enabled spreadsheet program such as MS Excel or OpenOffice Calc running on the server)
• The Open Office alternative to COM (PUNO) (requires Open Office installed on the server with Java support enabled)
• Nuovo's spreadsheet-reader (csv, xls, xlsx, and ods)
• SimpleExcel Claims to read and write Microsoft Excel XML / CSV / TSV / HTML / JSON / etc formats
• PHPExcleReader Is just a ZIP with an old version of PHPExcel
• Akeneo Labs Spreadsheet Parser OfficeOpenXML (.xlsx) and CSV files
• spout OfficeOpenXML (xlsx) and CSV
• xhook's php-spreadsheetreader Claims to do most formats

A new C++ Excel extension for PHP, though you'll need to build it yourself, and the docs are pretty sparse when it comes to trying to find out what functionality (I can't even find out from the site what formats it supports, or whether it reads or writes or both.... I'm guessing both) it offers is phpexcellib from SIMITGROUP.

All claim to be faster than PHPExcel from codeplex or from github, but (with the exception of COM, PUNO Ilia's wrapper around libXl and spout) they don't offer both reading and writing, or both xls and xlsx; may no longer be supported; and (while I haven't tested Ilia's extension) only COM and PUNO offers the same degree of control over the created workbook.

Solution 2:

I wrote a very simple class for exporting to "Excel XML" aka SpreadsheetML. It's not quite as convenient for the end user as XSLX (depending on file extension and Excel version, they may get a warning message), but it's a lot easier to work with than XLS or XLSX.

http://github.com/elidickinson/php-export-data