opening and reading Excel file in PHP

I am a new bie to PhP , also i am new into the corporate world, I have been given an assignment by my seniors .Can please any one help me with the scripting of opening and reading an excel f开发者_运维技巧ile in PHP. I have read a lot for it over google, but still nothing really is helping me.

Looking for positive replies.

I've used http://code.google.com/p/php-excel-reader/ before and would recommend it, it's quite simple and intuitive.

PHPExcel is what I would use. It is a bit of a pig but maybe they were just trying to conform to Microsoft standards. ;) I have had issues with extremely large tables of data. Aside from using the native tools you can also save file to excel xml. Much faster and works on anything excel 2003 and up (haven't tried on 2011 but should work.) As a last resort if you are parsing large amounts of data a standard csv is easy to do.