Automatically Emailing An Excel File

[tomyknoker]

Hi all... Initially I had to make a php page that would email each week information about new members of a site... That was fine I just used a cron job running the php page weekly... Now I've been asked to set up the email so it sends an Excel file of the data automatically... Does anyone know if this would be even possible?

[djr33]

You could do csv, etc. fairly easily, but excel is a proprietary format of microsoft, so you'd have to reverse engineer that, etc., which is even in a grey area of legality.

The other option would be to output a format that excel could import, such as csv, html tables, etc. I know excel can try to import those, but I'd test it out to see which works flawlessly, then generate it like that.

[tomyknoker]

So is it illegal to download data as an .xls format is that what you are saying? I didn't know jeez...

[djr33]

I'm not saying it's illegal.

I'm saying it's questionable since the format is owned by microsoft. I really don't care all that much, personally, but what i'm saying is that it isn't open source, certainly, so it's not just something you can look up and copy.

I see no problem in using a file from excel out of excel, since you own both a license to excel and own the contents of the file, so what you do with them is your choice. But the issue is just getting a way to access the format which is, as I said, only questionably attainable.