dude… its a brilliant art of programming… nice job man

Thanks for such an clear and simple method. I second the brilliant comment above.

This was AMAZING! I have literally spent a whole month trying to make the export work using another method. The quote from Albert Einstein is among my most favorite expressions. I was also able to make this solution work coming from an ExtJS grid.

Now if I can conquer filtering with CakePHP and ExtJS, my project will be complete.

Thank you again!

This is great, but what about exporting 17000+ records? This results in a 17 MB file, which takes forever to load, but goes down to 3.5 MB when re-saving in Excel.

Frederick: Glad it helped. I must admit I spent as much time as you thinking there must be a simpler way

Josh: yeah that can be troublesome when exporting large scale data. The reason why re-saving from Excel results in a much smaller file size, is that Excel converted text to binary. Try to open the new file in a text editor you will notice what i mean.

If you really need to export large set of data, then it would be worth investing the time and setting up the Pear’s spreadsheet excel writer I mentioned.

This seems to be the solution I’ve been looking for. I’ve installed everything as instructed but nothing happens. In Firefox, I’m redirected to /views/home.ctp for some reason and in Safari nothing happens at all. It’s definitely calling the function, but I’m never prompted to save the file.

Sorry so vague….any ideas?

hey Brett, not sure why that is happening, as long as the model exists and your are rendering the proper view with the proper layout it should work as expected.

If you can zip up the sample code you are working with and send it to info at dnamique dot com, I will be able to help you out.

Excellent, thank you very much

Indeed, simply the best!

Thanks; works great!

One thing though: Excel gives the following error “the file you are trying to open ‘report.xls’ is in a different format than specified by the file extension.” ; when I open it it works perfectly, but still doesn’t look too good.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

Great idea! Never thougt it would be so easy!

Gert: yeah I had that problem as well in latest versions of Excel. It doesn’t prevent the doc from opening though like you mentioned.
As in regards to how it looks, you can use CSS to style it if you want.

Thanks, mate, good work

Very nice and good post!

brilliant implementation of KISS methodology.

works like a charm
hahaha, this is actually fooling the browser by set the header as xls format
nice one!!

Thanks.
I adapted this idea to the symfony framework and it works

Hi, my developer plataform is Linux so I open the xls file with openoffice, but it tried to open as a csv file, after checking my code several times, I open the file in a ms windows computer and It works! So there is a way to make this openoffice compatible?Thanks in advance!

In IE8, this works perfectly on my development server but not on my live server. The only difference is that the live server uses SSL. Any suggestions?

Thanks a lot for sharing this. I was wondering if there is a way to make the output compatible with MS Excel 2010. It would give a warning with 2007 about the format being different from the specified extension but it would totally fail with 2010. Any possible hints?

Love it!! thank you very much !!!

The zip file contains a view/ folder instead of a views/ folder.

its a great one !!!!!

THANKS BUDDY…………..!!!!!!!

men, muchas gracias, funciona perfecto!!

Thanks for this simplesome script

Hi,

Its great and simple working fine

thanks a lot

Hi…Thanks for the script…it’s great and simple…But I have a question: If I want to put a macro (I’ve already write it) where or how i do that?

I hope you can help me and forget my poor English…

Thanks a lot!!!

Nice, this gave me good input. Thanks!

@Euronymous: an Excel macro you mean?
Forget about it, you can’t do that as far as I know.
This method here is just a simple way for a quick excel file output, nothing more.

Hi,

Thanks for this beautiful piece of code.

It works.

Regards
Tapan Thapa

Hello, I just read a comment above that says Microsoft Excel 2010 couldn’t get it opening ? Can someone confirm with this ?
Thanks for this idea and codes.

Thanks a lot for sharing this. I was wondering if there is a way to make the output compatible with MS Excel 2010. It would give a warning with 2007 about the format being different from the specified extension but it would totally fail with 2010. Any possible hints?

Hi,
This is working excellent at out local server, but when migrate code to live server then it create problem. Instead of Exporting Excel file it is showing the data in html format. Would be really thankful if provide any help.

Thanks in advance..

This solution solved my problem,

It works like a charm!!

TQVM

@John: This is has to do with MIME type setup on the other server. Check this link for more info, on how you can force the download of the file. http://apptools.com/phptools/force-download.php

great job that is very good thanks

Thanks for that, very helpfull.
But if I try to manually add a SUM formula in the gererated file, for any column, it won’t work, and will sum up to 0. Any ideas how to fix that ?

Thanks you so much for sharing!
It couldn’t be any easier than this…
Now I just have to adjust it to my own needs.
Keep up with the good work!

Am I missing something? I don’t get prompted to download an excel file. I’m developing in Cake 1.1 and use file extension .thtml. I am able to view the export_xls page in my browser with the correct model data but not being prompted to download a “Report.xls” file. Any ideas? Thanks.

THANK YOU! In 10 minutes I had the report I needed. You sir, are a hero!

Fantastic, but don’t work for Google Docs and Numbers (Mac).

I’m trying to fix up!

Thank you,
Helio

That s great…thank you.

i try it it’s so good, thank you very much
but i have a problem with it which is when i export arabic data from my database
it display as unknown letters when i open excel file

so can you give me a solution for this problem ..
thank you again

That’s a good,simple and useful solution.
Thanks so much..