Articles tagged: #fast-excel-templator

Word has mail merge: you take a template with fields and drop the data in. Excel appears to have nothing of the sort out of the box — so developers start assembling documents cell by cell in code. In fact, substituting values into a ready XLSX takes two lines: placeholders, the fill/replace difference, and the usual traps.

The accountant has already drawn the invoice form in Excel — with a logo, borders, number formats, and formulas. There is no need to reproduce that in code: FastExcelTemplator takes the ready XLSX as a template, substitutes data for the placeholders, and repeats table rows while keeping the formatting.

You need Excel in PHP, and the very first search result is PhpSpreadsheet — universal, heavy, and not always the right fit. Let's sort out what kinds of Excel tasks actually exist (reading, writing, templates) and how to tell which one is yours, so you don't haul in a combine harvester where a screwdriver would do.

Generating Excel in PHP looks like a simple task — right up until the file grows to hundreds of thousands of rows and the script hits its memory limit or dies on a timeout. This is an article about the philosophy of FastExcelPhp and the problems this family of libraries solves.