If you ever need to generate an XLS (Excel Spreadsheet) from PHP, the following function will let you easily accomplish this. This is adapted from code I found online, but I think my function is a lot easier to use since you just pass in an associative array of data. The aforementioned site did not cite any source, so if you are the author of the original xls functions leave a comment and I’ll give you a cookie.

function arrayToXls($input) {
    // BoF
    $ret = pack('ssssss', 0x809, 0x8, 0x0, 0x10, 0x0, 0x0);

    // array_values is used to ensure that the array is numerically indexed
    foreach (array_values($input) as $lineNumber => $row) {
        foreach (array_values($row) as $colNumber => $data) {
            if (is_numeric($data)) {
                // number, store as such
                $ret .= pack('sssssd', 0x203, 14, $lineNumber, $colNumber, 0x0, $data);
            } else {
                // everything else store as string
                $len = strlen($data);
                $ret .= pack('ssssss', 0x204, 8 + $len, $lineNumber, $colNumber, 0x0, $len) . $data;
            }
        }
    }

    //EoF
    $ret .= pack('ss', 0x0A, 0x00);

    return $ret;
}

A quick example of how to use it:

$input = array(
    array('Step', 'Action'),
    array(1, 'Collect Underpants'),
    array(2, '?'),
    array(3, 'Profit')
);

file_put_contents('lawl.xls', arrayToXls($input));