Question

I want to import data from excel file using PHP and then if possible, save it to a MySQL database.

Answer 1

Importing from Excel files (XLS) is way harder than improting from CSV files. Usually I save my XLS to CSV with Excel then work on this CSV with PHP…

Look at PHP function fgetcsv at:
http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.fgetcsv.php

<?php
$row = 1;
if (($handle = fopen("test.csv", "r")) !== FALSE) {
    while (($data = fgetcsv($handle, 1000, ",")) !== FALSE) {
        $num = count($data);
        echo "<p> $num fields in line $row: <br /></p>\n";
        $row++;
        for ($c=0; $c < $num; $c++) {
            echo $data[$c] . "<br />\n";
        }
    }
    fclose($handle);
}
?> 

If you still want to load XLS directly from PHP it’s possible (but how reliable)… A quick seach resulted in http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpexcelreader/ which might be helpful.