Creating Excel Files with PHP

I looked into doing that for a little while, it didn't really work
If you're just handling data, why not just make a  csv?  Excel can read csv just fine (comma separated values)

It's possible, but as pjargon says, seems prone to errors.  If you want to try it anyway, here's a couple places to look:

http://jaxn.org/cataBlog.php?articleID=290
http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/PHP-and-COM/1/

Whats the easiest way to write out the files to the server.  I've never worked with creating files. just creating the webpages with php.  Can you point me to an example.

Either of these:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.file-put-contents.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fwrite.php

Should be pretty simple file output, yes?
thx google:  http://www.softwareforeducation.com/php/13file-io.htm

You may have to mess with permissions

I have found the easiest is a TAB delimted file.
Since sometimes values need to contain a ','

if you save everything into arrays, you can then write them to a file using serialize

http://www.php.net/serialize
http://www.php.net/unserialize

and read them using unserialize

About writing to a file - directly from php.net help on fwrite():
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fwrite.php

<?php
$filename = 'test.txt';
$somecontent = "Add this to the file\n";

// Let's make sure the file exists and is writable first.
if (is_writable($filename)) {

   // In our example we're opening $filename in append mode.
   // The file pointer is at the bottom of the file hence
   // that's where $somecontent will go when we fwrite() it.
   if (!$handle = fopen($filename, 'a')) {
        print "Cannot open file ($filename)";
        exit;
   }

   // Write $somecontent to our opened file.
   if (!fwrite($handle, $somecontent)) {
       print "Cannot write to file ($filename)";
       exit;
   }
   
   print "Success, wrote ($somecontent) to file ($filename)";
   
   fclose($handle);
                   
} else {
   print "The file $filename is not writable";
}
?>

Commas inside fields is not a problem with CSV, because field content is usually quoted, thus escaping the commas. In some instances it will even allow line breaks inside fields. CSV for excel works very nicely as long as you're not doing anything that's excel specific, like drawing graphs or running macros, and is very simple to do. I generate Excel-tagged CSV for downloads - the important thing is to give it the correct MIME type for it to be picked up by Excel, which is application/msexcel.

Check this tutorial
http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/114/0.php