Question

is there a way that I can format data from a .csv file created with the php function fputcsv into Excel-like tables? Meaning, I don’t want my data to be separated by commas, I want them to appear in tables like an Excel spreadsheet or something.

I know I can do that in Excel itself, but is there a way to do that directly without tweaking the file in Excel (like with a php function or something)

Answer 1

fputcsv does exactly what the manual says:
It formats a line as CSV and writes it to a file pointer.

The output can then be imported into Excel or other csv-capable software.

You can generate Excel files directly via php, too, but therefore you have to delve very deep into the Excel file format. If you want to do this, I recommend PHPExcel. This project provides…

…a set of classes for the PHP programming language, which allow you to
write to and read from different file formats, like Excel 2007, PDF,
HTML, … This project is built around Microsoft’s OpenXML standard
and PHP.