I want to connect Excel to my web site, as an external data source, and thereby run reports on the data that is fetched from my website. I have heard that this should be possible to do and Excel seems to support it, but I have little knowledge on how I actually should build the backend on my PHP server to serve the data. How do I do it?
I am well aware of the fact of being able to create and read Excel files on a PHP server, but that’s not what I am after.
Excel supports IQY, internet queries.
You may define one in excel pointing at your webserver and get the data right into excel.
You may use formatted html-tables at your server. Colors will be preserved.
the iry-format is described at:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/157482
and supports both post/get and parameters.
regards
//t