time Posted January 23, 2008 Share Posted January 23, 2008 I've only coded a few html pages in my life and I'm trying to figure out if I'm way over my head here. I'm trying to create an online ordering page that has 3 user input fields and a drop down box that I can collect data from. I would like to avoid having my email overloaded and copying and pasting the information by hand into excel so... is there a way to have the information from the form automatically placed into an excel file? Or more precisely, is there a relatively simple way to do this? I already have the form coded, just need the submission part figured out. I'm doing this on a MacBook Pro and coding in plain old TextEdit, no fancy programs. If there is a way, I'm good at following directions so any help is greatly appreciated.Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ingolme Posted January 23, 2008 Share Posted January 23, 2008 To store information into databases (which I think is preferrable to an excel file because you can read the data however you like) you'll need to learn PHP and MySQL. If you want to read the data in excel I think you can export database data in csv files or some format like that.There's nothing in a website that needs fancy programs to be made. Everything can be done with notepad.Check out W3Schools' PHP tutorial Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Synook Posted January 23, 2008 Share Posted January 23, 2008 If you don't need fancy excel things like formulas and formatting, you can just write the data as CSV using PHP's file functions.However, if you need to automatically manipulate that data later on, databases would be a better idea. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
time Posted January 24, 2008 Author Share Posted January 24, 2008 If you don't need fancy excel things like formulas and formatting, you can just write the data as CSV using PHP's file functions.However, if you need to automatically manipulate that data later on, databases would be a better idea.The only thing I may have to do to the data laster is sort it. Otherwise, no formulas or formatting. What's CSV?Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ingolme Posted January 24, 2008 Share Posted January 24, 2008 It's a data saving format: Comma Separated Values.I think it's something like this:cell11,cell12,cell13;cell21,cell22,cell23;I'm not sure, I've never examined the format. Anyways, it saves database table information in a file that excel knows how to read. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
justsomeguy Posted January 24, 2008 Share Posted January 24, 2008 You can copy and paste an HTML table directly into Excel, it will keep all of the formatting. It might only work (or work best) when you copy from IE. If you want to automatically generate a CSV file that Excel can open then you will need to use a server-side language like PHP. PHP has this function to convert an array to a comma-separated list that can go into a CSV file:http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fputcsv.phpThe format of a CSV file generally is that each field is separated with a comma and each line is separated with a newline character. If a field has a comma in the value then you can wrap the field value with quotes, if the field has a quote in the value then you can escape the quote with a backslash. The PHP function will do all of that for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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