I've been recently working on a script that uploads image batches to PocketKnowledge via its backend. In addition to a deepened understanding of the application's construct and the functionality of its various modules, there were actually some good findings about spreadsheet processing that can be used in the future.
The two popular formats of excel files a PHP script will need to handle are csv and xls. For the former, people can use a standard PHP utility called fgetcsv. It's easy to use in that it parses csv files like a usual file handler. For each row in the file, it returns a list of ...