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PHP Excel Reader
 I recently had a request to setup a payment gateway on a website, so that visitors can purchase online. The website was built using MS Publisher and the products were spread across multiple static html pages. Unlike eCommerce websites, this website had no database populating the product catalogue and no shopping cart. My initial thought was to completely scrap the existing website and develop a database driven website from scratch. As the cost of development proved to be a key factor, the challenge was clear. Find a cost effective solution for visitors to purchase the available products on the website, without redesigning and redeveloping the website, and still provide an easy "no-knowledge-of-code" way, for the client to update his product list and prices. The first step was to determine the medium in which the client would provide the product list, secondly, the purchasing process and thirdly, how to populate the form posting to the payment gateway for transaction. The medium was MS Excel. The purchasing process, (though it is not a user friendly way to go about selling your products, but given the circumstance I found no other alternative) was to use a single purchasing form with a drop down list of the products, with the necessary posting data. The goal was to populate the drop down list with the updated MS Excel. All the client has to do from his side, is update the excel spreadsheet and upload it to the website. Sounds simple, but reading Excel documents to populate html pages is not the easiest of tasks. The solution, PHP Excel Reader. Thanks to the good people at Google the PHP library has grown from the great work done in the PHP Excel Reader project on SourceForge. It reads the binary format of XLS files directly and can return values and formats from any cell.
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