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I was recently asked by a client if I could use an existing Excel spreadsheet and create a single-page web site from it. This way, their team would be able to use the work they’ve already done and the data they’ve already keyed in and wouldn’t need to do double the work.
I could have built an data import tool that used the Excel data and reformatted it for WordPress or another content management system, but after asking a few questions I figured the simplest and most cost-effect approach was to use the Excel spreadsheet as the datastore.
It sounded fun. So I gave it a shot.
Here is what I came up with. It is a bit simple, arguably a bit crude, and wouldn’t work for anything terribly complex or for a high-traffic site, but, it works for them and that is all that matters.
Let’s start out with a simple example spreadsheet. Let’s say you have the following data for your soccer team in Excel.
In this case you have four columns; Name, Age, Jersey Number, Goals. How can you get those to display in a web page? Using PHPExcel, which I’ve used on several client projects, you can read from and write to an Excel spreadsheet fairly easily using PHP. Using the above data as an example, the code might look like this.
// Load PHPExcel, then load Excel spreadsheet
include ‘lib/PHPExcel/IOFactory.php’;
$objPHPExcel = PHPExcel_IOFactory::load($file);
// Read the Sheet data, create Array
$sheetData = $objPHPExcel->getActiveSheet()->toArray(null,true,true,true);
$players = array(); // Array used to store player information
// Go through each row one-by-one
foreach( $sheetData as $row ) :
