5 Best PHP Libraries to Work with Excel

The spreadsheet is a popular data format for personal and business use, because it offers a way to store tabular data in an organized manner. It is also one of the most commonly used formats for storing information about multiple rows and columns. Excel files are widely used by businesses to manage their day-to-day operations. But these files can be difficult to work with from the command line or outside of Microsoft Office software suites, which is why there are many PHP libraries that have been created just for this purpose! In this blog post we will explore five different PHP libraries that you can use with your Excel files, so let’s get started!

phpspreadsheet

The phpspreadsheet library is a PHP extension that can be used to read, create and write spreadsheets. It features various calculation engines with localisation support for markets such as China, Russia and India. This allows developers to distribute their spreadsheet application in different languages by providing locale-specific data without any additional programming or development effort.

PHPExcel is the older version of PhpSpreadsheet. The developer broke compatibility to drastically improve code base quality by introducing namespaces, PSR compliance, and use of newest PHP language features. 

Spout

If you’re looking for the best library to interact with Excel, such that files are handled in a fast and scalable way, then maybe Spout is just what you need. This file reader is different from others. You can read very large files, while keeping the memory usage really low.

Spout is the perfect package for all your project’s data needs, and can also make managing huge data files a breeze. It’s easy to install, powerful in use, and with read speeds that are twice as fast as other libraries on offer just now it gives you plenty of time eat lunch or have that coffee break while those reports get done.

PHP Excel Templator

This PHP library allows you to export excel files from an excel template. PHP Excel Templator is a library which creates excel files on the fly from templates. It’s perfect for finance, accounting and engineering industries. So whether you need to create monthly reports, revenue projections or balance sheets – just create an excel template and use this reusable code extension instead of coding something from scratch every time.

SimpleXLSX

SimpleXLSX is a lightweight, fast library to parse and retrieve data from MS Excel 2007 XLSx files. This dependency-free PHP library interacts with an underlying SimpleXML parser through the built-in unzip() function and without needing any additional extensions or modules.

PHP_XLSXWriter

PHP_XLSXWriter is designed to be an easy-to use, lightweight library for outputting xlsx files in Office 2007+ formats. It supports basic cell formatting and formulas – perfect for generating simple budgets or project plans for Excel users who want their data in the same format.

This library for PHP was designed as a lightweight solution that would work on an Excel compatible file with just basic features supported. With this package you can easily create large and complex spreadsheets to be saved as xlsx compatible XLSX files.