Today's adventure in PHP coding has been to read an Excel spreadsheet as data!

I've been doing PHP for just 10 years now. I've written all of my sites in my signature below by hand, in PHP and JavaScript.

Most of us can gather our Affiliate statistics from AEBN, or HotMovies or XTube and put them in .csv files. And we can read those .csv files with PHP scripts, and do arithmetic, or make charts and graphs.

But .csv files are when we take an Excel file and Save As .csv. And, we better not have any extra commas in text fields!!

Save As .csv is an extra step! So I took 2 hours today and made reading the Excel file itself work, the same way I read .csv files.

While that may or may not be that big of a deal with simple stats data, it is a big deal for other Excel spreadsheets I have, e.g. budgets, or projections, as those involve calculations. Having Cells calculate or do arithmetic on a number of other Cells is the basic purpose of an Excel spreadsheet in the first place.

This also gets me one step closer to stopping using MySQL! Already for the past 2 years, I have been keeping simple data tables saved in my working directory (as the Arrays themselves, not just .csv). Now, I will be able to keep more complex data tables, as local files, not in the fussy MySQL tables. And, I can download and save, and I can use between multiple Domains, when those Domains are on different Hosts.