looking for advise on importing excel into mysql with php

Alright, see if I can pick your brains from you all.

I'm currently working on a project where all the information comes from different clients, the only thing in common is that the received data is done with excel. The excel spread sheet that they present is just a bunch of references and codes, and the problem than I'm facing is that I need the references and codes to be entered in certain format in order for the website to work.

The perfect situation will be to go to each client and teach how I would ne开发者_开发知识库ed the data, but I can't do that because of the large number of clients, and more importantly I will be interrupting their work flow. Each client has its own codes and reference model and they are not willing to change their process

The good news is that there is a standard pattern for the codes, but I'm talking close to 200 thousand codes with a bunch of combination.

They way that we are currently solving the problem is that we have a person who checks each excel sheet received, runs a few macros, and manually fixes those codes in which the macro was not able to fix.

The person that is doing this, is already burn out and frustrated and I would like to automatize this process with php.

Suggestions?

There's a nice class called PHPExcel that allows you to write and read from a variety of document types:

http://www.codeplex.com/PHPExcel

You need to enable the php_zip extension for Excel 2007 documents

you can use dbTube.org to solve your problem. You can configure the mapping in graphical editor. The import definition can be saved and reused. It is not neccessary to change the excel sheet.

Greetings Andreas