Welcome to PhpSpreadsheet's documentation
PhpSpreadsheet is a library written in pure PHP and offers a set of classes that allow you to read and write various spreadsheet file formats such as Excel and LibreOffice Calc.
File formats supported
| Format | Reading | Writing |
|---|---|---|
| Open Document Format/OASIS (.ods) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Office Open XML (.xlsx) Excel 2007 and above | ✓ | ✓ |
| BIFF 8 (.xls) Excel 97 and above | ✓ | ✓ |
| BIFF 5 (.xls) Excel 95 | ✓ | |
| SpreadsheetML (.xml) Excel 2003 | ✓ | |
| Gnumeric | ✓ | |
| HTML | ✓ | ✓ |
| SYLK | ✓ | |
| CSV | ✓ | ✓ |
| PDF (using either the TCPDF, Dompdf or mPDF libraries, which need to be installed separately) | ✓ |
Note - reading or writing certain aspects of a spreadsheet may not be supported in all formats. For more details, please consult Features Cross-reference.
Getting started
Software requirements
PHP version 8.1 or newer to develop using PhpSpreadsheet. Other requirements, such as PHP extensions, are enforced by
composer. See the require section of the composer.json file
for details.
PHP version support
LTS: Support for PHP versions will only be maintained for a period of six months beyond the end of life of that PHP version.
Currently, the required PHP minimum version is PHP 8.1, and we will support that version until June 2026.
Support for PHP versions will only be maintained for a period of six months beyond the end of life of that PHP version.
See the composer.json for other requirements.
Installation
Use composer to install PhpSpreadsheet into your project:
composer require phpoffice/phpspreadsheet
Or also download the documentation and samples if you plan to use them:
composer require phpoffice/phpspreadsheet --prefer-source
If you are building your installation on a development machine that is on a different PHP version to the server where it
will be deployed, or if your PHP CLI version is different from your run-time such as php-fpm or Apache's mod_php,
then you might want to configure composer for that.
See composer documentation
on how to edit your composer.json to ensure that the correct dependencies are retrieved to match your deployment
environment.
See CLI vs Application run-time for more details.
Additional Installation Options
If you want to write to PDF, or to include Charts when you write to HTML or PDF, then you will need to install additional libraries:
For PDF Generation, you can install any of the following, and then configure PhpSpreadsheet to indicate which library you are going to use: - mpdf/mpdf - dompdf/dompdf - tecnickcom/tcpdf
and configure PhpSpreadsheet using:
// Dompdf, Mpdf or Tcpdf (as appropriate)
$className = \PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Writer\Pdf\Dompdf::class;
IOFactory::registerWriter('Pdf', $className);
or the appropriate PDF Writer wrapper for the library that you have chosen to install.
Chart Export
For Chart export, we support following packages, which you will also need to install yourself using composer require
- jpgraph/jpgraph (this package was abandoned at version 4.0.
You can manually download the latest version that supports PHP 8 and above from jpgraph.net)
- mitoteam/jpgraph - up to date fork with modern PHP versions support and some bugs fixed.
and then configure PhpSpreadsheet using:
// to use jpgraph/jpgraph
Settings::setChartRenderer(\PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Chart\Renderer\JpGraph::class);
//or
// to use mitoteam/jpgraph
Settings::setChartRenderer(\PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Chart\Renderer\MtJpGraphRenderer::class);
One or the other of these libraries is necessary if you want to generate HTML or PDF files that include charts; or to render a Chart to an Image format from within your code.
They are not necessary to define charts for writing to Xlsx files.
Other file formats don't support writing Charts.
Hello World
This would be the simplest way to write a spreadsheet:
<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Spreadsheet;
use PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Writer\Xlsx;
$spreadsheet = new Spreadsheet();
$activeWorksheet = $spreadsheet->getActiveSheet();
$activeWorksheet->setCellValue('A1', 'Hello World !');
$writer = new Xlsx($spreadsheet);
$writer->save('hello world.xlsx');
Learn by example
A good way to get started is to run some of the samples. Don't forget to download them via --prefer-source composer
flag. And then serve them via PHP built-in webserver:
php -S localhost:8000 -t vendor/phpoffice/phpspreadsheet/samples
Then point your browser to:
http://localhost:8000/
The samples may also be run directly from the command line, for example:
php vendor/phpoffice/phpspreadsheet/samples/Basic/01_Simple.php
Learn by documentation
For more documentation in depth, you may read about an overview of the architecture, creating a spreadsheet, worksheets, accessing cells and reading and writing to files.
Or browse the API documentation.
Credits
Please refer to the contributor list for up-to-date credits.