Question

I have a table within a mysql database. What i want to do, is in a php page, run a select statement and output the result into an excel file.

I’ve seen quite a few tutorials out there and tried them, however these output the contents of the webpage into the excel file. I just want the mysql table data and headers.

Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

You can use one of the available PHP libraries for that. One, two.

One thing that is pretty fast to develop but not as neat as using a LIBRARY for that is:

1. Perform your MySQL query
2. Create an HTML table with the results
3. Set content type of the response to: application/vnd.ms-excel

In most browsers, using that page will open the HTML table as a spreadsheet in Excel. You can use other HTTP headers to suggest file name for that file.