Add another sheet to excel export from PHP - php

Question

First, I have a few knowledge in PHP, and that is all I could do with my excel export (see attached code below)
It works, but I want to export that excel file with 2 more sheets, I've googled a lot but could not customize the code to insert in it, please, help me if you can
Thank you
<?php
$filename = time().".csv";
header ( 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK' );
header ( 'Date: ' . date ( 'D M j G:i:s T Y' ) );
header ( 'Last-Modified: ' . date ( 'D M j G:i:s T Y' ) );
header ( 'Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel') ;
header ( 'Content-Disposition: attachment;filename='.$filename);
ExportFile1($main_exce);
function ExportFile1($records) {
$do = false;
if(!empty($records)){
foreach($records as $down){
$heading = true;
foreach($down as $row) {
if($heading) {
// display field/column names as a first row
$heading = false;
if(!$do){
$d = implode("\t", array_values($row)) . "\n";
print chr(255) . chr(254) . mb_convert_encoding($d, 'UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8');
$do = true;
}
}else{
$d = implode("\t", array_values($row)) . "\n";
print chr(255) . chr(254) . mb_convert_encoding($d, 'UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8');
}
}
// $d = "\t\n\t\n\t\n";
// print chr(255) . chr(254) . mb_convert_encoding($d, 'UTF-16LE', 'UTF-8');
}
}
}
exit;
?>

Answer 1

The reason you can't make this work is that you are not creating an Excel export here.
You're creating a plain-text, tab-delimited file. Excel can import files in that format, but it's not a true Excel file. It's a simple flat file, and as such, it doesn't support multiple worksheets, unlike a real Excel file.
If you want to solve this, you need to rewrite this code so that it outputs a file which is in the real Excel file format - it's considerably more complex than a tab-delimited text format. There are various libraries available for PHP which can help you easily create real Excel files in xlsx format. Recommendations are off-topic here but they are not hard to find using a search engine.