Dieter Adriaenssens a écrit :
2011/8/3 Marc Delisle marc@infomarc.info:
Michal Čihař a écrit :
Hi
Dne Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:18:33 -0400 Marc Delisle marc@infomarc.info napsal(a):
Michal Čihař a écrit :
I still wonder if native support for Excel 2007 is worth including 3 MiB of code.
Where I work, a user faced a situation where simple CSV exporting was not enough but I don't remember the specifics. Maybe Dieter can add his comments about native support's advantages.
Having use case when native Excel is needed would definitely help in making such decision.
Michal, in this old message from June 2004 https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=20040608142911.GA1... you mention that you added MS Excel export with PEAR Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer.
Then Garvin Hicking replied "it's a good benefit".
We could ask the phpmyadmin-users list about use cases.
Good idea.
I wouldn't drop Excel (97/2003 or 2007) export just like that, unless nobody seems to use it of course. ;) F.e. : It's very useful to export data from a database using a query to an excel-sheet to use for further analysis (or other uses). Since both Excel 2003 and 2007 (and other versions) are still widely used, I don't think that any of them can be dropped. It's true that CSV-export can be used for that, but it would mean an extra step to convert to Excel.
Not necessarily an extra step. In my tests, Excel is happy to open this .csv file and save changes to it (it just displays a warning at save time but no need to convert).
I admit I'm not a seasoned Excel user.
I had a brief look at the PHPExcel library yesterday and I think it will be possible to remove a lot from the library that we don't use, including the OLE part (which would solve the license problem). OLE is used to link objects (like an excel sheet or a graph) to other documents/applications, but we don't use that when exporting to Excel format.
How about shipping just wrapper files (export and import plugins), which would work only if PHPExcel is installed in PHP search path?
This might be more difficult to set up for user in hosting environments.
True, but the phpMyAdmin package has to be installed by someone anyway. It could be part of the installation procedure to install the PHPExcel library somewhere. But then again, this might cause compatibility problems with future releases of both phpMyAdmin and PHPExcel.
It definitely would be, however it would save us of licensing troubles and decrease download size.