Excel and PDF from PHP

Been meaning to post this for ages, but PHP Architect magazine for November 2008 had a useful article on libraries and code for alternatives to HTML.

For PDF html2pdf was introduced. Unlike other PHP PDF libraries (e.g. PDFLib, FPDF) this one has you make your content in HTML then it gets converted. For those of us comfortable with HTML, that means no learning curve.

For Excel, PHPExcel is introduced. This has classes to read and write excel files in a variety of formats. I get this request a lot but so far we have always decided outputting good old CSV is best (simple to make, compact, easy to import into Excel). But if complex layout, or built-in functions, are required this looks worth a look. It can also output into PDF.

Also very interesting is in-memory spreadsheets, with lots of mathematical functions supported. I've not tried it, and neither the article or the website mention explicitly if this will work on Linux (or a Windows machine without Excel installed), but it is described as standalone so it should. It might be an interesting way to port someones spreadsheet to a PHP app!

The article also briefly introduces Google charts, and how to include the produced image in your excel file.