Prev Getting Started	ExcelExplorer Manual	Next A simple tutorial

This manual explains main concepts of what ExcelExplorer can do, how it works and how to work with it. All classes, functions, data types described in detail with some samples.

ExcelExplorer is the package of PHP classes that provides the ability to read and process data from a binary MS Excel files. The main goal is to provide ability to retrieve data from an Excel file undex any OS (Linux, for example) without installing additional modules, extensions or libraries. ExcelExplorer is not a stand-alone application. Instead of this it provides easy-to-use, multifunctional programming interface for the PHP programmers. Using build-in caching, controlling what data to read, new features presented in PHP5 and many other techniques it's provides impressive speed, stability and optimal memory usage.

Basic concepts and examples of usage will helps you to understand how it works, what you can do using this package and what programming skills you need.

The earlier versions of ExcelExplorers works both on PHP4 and PHP5 platforms. Starting from ExcelExplorer 4.0 it works only for PHP5. This is done because of the following reasons:

• Package intensively uses functionality provided only by PHP5 such as dereferencing - ability to made a calls like $class->method1()->method2();
• In PHP4 found some critical bugs that causes to memory leaks and even scripts crashing when it intensively uses objects and references. It makes impossible to develop a clean and stable code;
• Finally, for the present day PHP5 is the widely used and it installed on most of hostings, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Main Features
Supported Excel versions	Excel 5.0 / Excel 7.0 (Excel 95) / Excel 8.0 (Excel 97) / Excel 9.0 (Excel 2000) / Excel 10.0 (Excel XP) / Excel 11.0 (Excel 2003) and above
OS	any OS that supports PHP (Windows - all versions, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Novell NetWare, OS/2, RISC OS, SGI IRIX 6.5.x, etc. - see supported platforms on www.php.net)
Requirements	PHP 5.0.1 and above
Types of Data Supported
Sheets	Title, type (ordinary, chart, Visual Basic Module), visibility
Columns and Rows	Width and height, grouping level, visibility
Cell Data Types	Integer, float, text (string), formula, hyperlink, logical (boolean), error (error code), empty, blank
Cell Data Formats	Floating-point precision, percentage, date and others
Cell Styles	Rich-text strings (multiple font styles in one cell), asian phonetics, merged cells, font, string format, foreground and background colors, alignment, borders
Images and Shapes	Images in different formats, shapes that controls where and how image must be shown.
Summary information	MS Office files contain summary information (creation date, author, OS used, title and other).
Engine Features
Build-in caching
Multiple extraction modes for memory-limited systems
Controlling data extraction process by setting appropriate option flags
Object-oriented API

Prev Getting Started	Home Up	Next A simple tutorial