I have an open excel sheet that's constantly being updated by another program via DDE. I wish to have a php script that accesses some of the data in this excel sheet. I have tried using PHPExcel and it seems that I cannot have the changes I make (e.g. via setCellValue) being immediately reflected in the open excel sheet. Similarly, if I change value of a cell (without saving sheet to the file system) the new value of the cell is not available via getValue().
Is this functionality supported by phpExcel? If so, could someone please point me to documentation that shows how this can be done? Alternatively, is there another way (not using phpExcel, for example) to do this?
Thanks.
I was able to do this using the method shown at the rarified blog webpage
This worked for me, both for "pushing" cell values from php to excel, as well as getting modified values (without saving the file) from excel to perl. This site also has a nifty ajax-based function that keeps auto-refreshing my webpage with the latest values in excel.
Many thanks to the author of the blog.
It's not supported by PHPExcel.... PHPExcel loads the workbook into memory at the point in time when you issue the load() call , and at that point it can't "autorefresh" whenever the workbook is changed by your DDE because the DDE update is to the workbook on disk, not the PHPEXcel copy that's in PHP memory.
You'd need to be constantly loading and reloading to pick up changes to the underlying file.
Likewise, if you change the workbook in PHPExcel, it doesn't write that change back to the file on disk unless you explicitly save(), so the change will not be visible to your DDE program.
I'm not aware whether you can even do this with MS Excel itself... if you load a workbook using MS Excel itself, you're loading from disk into memory, and if anything else is accessing that workbook at the time, you find that you've loaded it in read-only mode, and (as far as I'm aware) it won't automatically refresh whenever the DDE program updates the original version. If anything can work with this the way you need, it's likely to be COM, but I wouldn't build up your hopes too much.
Related
I am using PHPSpreadsheet
I am using freezePane('A9') in every excel generated by our web application.
At end, I am also adding setSelectedCell('A9');.
But when I open excel file it gets open with "A10" as the active cell. And also "A9" is scrolled down. So one has to scroll up to see row "9".
Check here an image of the issue.
This sounds a little like your issue, https://github.com/PHPOffice/PhpSpreadsheet/issues/389
Their response of a sorts of fix is this:
can be corrected by explicitly providing 'topLeftCell' argument:
$spreadsheet->getActiveSheet()->freezePane('A2','A2');
Here's my clients scenario my client wants to put a excel file on server now from a PHP form
sends data to the file runs a formula in this excel file and get the results.
I don't know if this is possible.
If so direct me to a library best was PHP, or some other possible solutions.
It's perfectly possible: take a look at the PHPExcel library which has a built-in calculation engine for handling most Excel formulae
There's an example of populating an Excel file with data (in this case from a form input) then rendering a formula in that Excel file to generate a result an ddisplaying it to a web browser in the /Tests/ directory of the distribution. This simple example /Quadratic.php solves a quadratic equation; but the principle is similar enough
EDIT
See my response to this question for some indication of the limitations of PHPExcel's calculation engine
EDIT 2
The PHPExcel is deprecated, hence now you can use PhpSpreadsheet
You are thinking in the wrong direction. Instead trying to send the data to the excel file, read the excel file in you PHP script and do the math there.
Trying to send dynamic data into a static XLS file wont work.
And you can add a regular cronjob, that checks if the XLS file data has changed, if it has, then run your calculation again.
I have developed a VBA spreadsheet that runs locally and with obtain data from other sources continuously.
I want to find a way to extract / access the data inside this spreadsheet through php and then output some processed data using a browser and these data will update accordingly as the spreadsheet updates itself.
Anyone can show me how to achieve this? Both the spreadsheet and the php will run locally on a windows machine if that is easier...
Thanks very much for your help :)
I just developed an application that does this the idea is to use http requests on_change events in the spreadsheet.
vba code for request in excel
Function httpRequest(ByVal path As String) As String
Set HttpReq = CreateObject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP")
HttpReq.Open "GET", path, False
HttpReq.Send
httpRequest = HttpReq.ResponseText
End Function
On your php side you have to develop the part where the data is mapped in the database. And of course the view of the data. As for realtime you have to go for something more elaborate like a table that holds the latest changes and check for such changes every now and then unless there is some mechanism to do so.
In excel there exist timers to acomplish polled checking for updates
for web you should to use ajax for seamless updates have a look at http://datatables.net/
You can use PHP Excel Reader to display the data quite easily from the spreadsheet - I think this is the simplest of the PHP Excel libraries that will do what you want and simply set the page to refresh on a regular basis.
Using this library is pretty much as simple as this:
<?php echo $data->dump(true,true); ?>
Once you have told it where the file is to display the output pretty much as would be expected to see in an Excel Workbook. (Here is a link to an example that they have up and running online)
This means you won't get any locking issues as the read is done rather quickly (assuming a reasonable file size and users won't really ever be more than a few minutes/seconds behind.
You want PHP to just generate HTML from Excel sheets? Excel supports HTML generation natively.
Try Save as Web Page to test the quality of HTML produced by Excel. If it's OK then all you'll have to do is write a small piece of VBA that will be generating HTML from your spreadsheets automatically.
Sort of CMS build in Excel.
Using PHPExcel I can run each tab separately and get the results I want but if I add them all into one excel it just stops, no error or any thing.
Each tab consists of about 60 to 80 thousand records and I have about 15 to 20 tabs. So about 1600000 records split into multiple tabs (This number will probably grow as well).
Also I have tested the 65000 row limitation with .xls by using the .xlsx extension with no problems if I run each tab it it's own excel file.
Pseudo code:
read data from db
start the PHPExcel process
parse out data for each page (some styling/formatting but not much)
(each numeric field value does get summed up in a totals column at the bottom of the excel using the formula SUM)
save excel (xlsx format)
I have 3GB of RAM so this is not an issue and the script is set to execute with no timeout.
I have used PHPExcel in a number of projects and have had great results but having such a large data set seems to be an issue.
Anyone every have this problem? work around? tips? etc...
UPDATE:
on error log --- memory exhausted
Besides adding more RAM to the box is there any other tips I could do?
Anyone every save current state and edit excel with new data?
I had the exact same problem and googling around did not find a valuable solution.
As PHPExcel generates Objects and stores all data in memory, before finally generating the document file which itself is also stored in memory, setting higher memory limits in PHP will never entirely solve this problem - that solution does not scale very well.
To really solve the problem, you need to generate the XLS file "on the fly". Thats what i did and now i can be sure that the "download SQL resultset as XLS" works no matter how many (million) row are returned by the database.
Pity is, i could not find any library which features "drive-by" XLS(X) generation.
I found this article on IBM Developer Works which gives an example on how to generate the XLS XML "on-the-fly":
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-phpexcel/#N101FC
Works pretty well for me - i have multiple sheets with LOTS of data and did not even touch the PHP memory limit. Scales very well.
Note that this example uses the Excel plain XML format (file extension "xml") so you can send your uncompressed data directly to the browser.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_XML_formats#Excel_XML_Spreadsheet_example
If you really need to generate an XLSX, things get even more complicated. XLSX is a compressed archive containing multiple XML files. For that, you must write all your data on disk (or memory - same problem as with PHPExcel) and then create the archive with that data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
Possibly its also possible to generate compressed archives "on the fly", but this approach seems really complicated.
I have a software which give me stock data as excel format , the data is automatically update continuously in every second.i have to show these data in web page such like they are shw in excel (ie the web data should be also update in such manner ) and these data. how it is be done.
Programatically export the data into CSV format and import it into a relational database.
Extract the data with web language and display in webpage. Tutorials for these steps should all be available.
To convert from xls to csv see the question...
converting an Excel (xls) file to a comma separated (csv) file without the GUI
For the second part, you can have a cron job run a PHP script that reads in the csv file contents and inserts this into a database. Plenty of threads on this also.
To display, select from database and format appropriately, can follow any of the basic tuts on the net for this part.
Post your code if you get stuck :)
As you've been told, use PHPExcel to read Excel file.
However, refreshing data every second is gonna make a very heavy load on your server.
I'd recommend you rather use server side push using Comet technologies. Take a look at Meteor server.
You will accomplish 'persistent' connection, so server will push data to the client, and the need to refresh the page or create ajax request every second will be gone.
You've tagged this PHP, so I assume that's your scripting language of choice: use PHPExcel to read the Excel file and write it out as formatted HTML to your web page. PHPExcel's HTML Writer will retain all the style and formatting of the original Excel workbook.
However, an update every second is pretty extreme for a web page, and for a scripting language. Rather than reading the Excel file whenever the page is requested, run this as a background task converting the Excel to a static HTML file whenever an Excel file is received, and serve the latest static HTML.
If this extreme timing is needed, then you might be better looking at a compiled language, or even a non-web solution.