Requirement: To allow a visitor to your web site to click on a link that downloads data from the server into a Microsoft Excel spreadhseet.

Solutions - I'm going to offer you two:

a) To send the output as a text file - delimited by tabs between columns, and with new lines for each new line. Add appropriate content type headers (such as octet-stream) to save the file to local disc rather than displaying it, and pass back a file name with a .xls extension to provide direction to the operating system as to how to handle the file. In most environments, Excel will do the import for you.

I have written an example that does this, grabbing data from one of our MySQL databases that logs web site traffic Run the example or see the source of the example

or b) To send the output as an HTML table, in which case Excel will interpret the rows and columns of the tables as its data cells. I've written an example of this too - using an alternative content type to show the flexibility that's available. And I have also put a formula into one of the cells so that you can get excel to fill in the extra boxes for you.

This example just populates a spread sheet with some numbers as a "proof of concept" but it's still a series of useful pointers, I hope. You can Run the example or see the source code

You'll notice in the source code of both examples that I've added in extra headers in my response to ensure that the browser doesn't cache the results - that's done to make sure that you get a fresh download each time you run the scripts, rather than being given stored old data.
(written 2008-01-25)

 H112 - PHP - Further Web Page and Network Handling
  [3568] Telling which ServerAlias your visitor used - useful during merging domains - (2012-01-04)
  [3540] Easy session example in PHP - keeping each customers data apart - (2011-12-06)
  [3432] 3 digit HTTP status codes - what are they, which are most common, which should be a concern? - (2011-09-11)
  [3036] Sending out an email containing HTML from within a PHP page - (2010-11-07)
  [2918] Downloading a report from the web for further local analysis - (2010-08-13)
  [2729] Uploading a document or image to its own URL via a browser - (2010-04-18)
  [2679] How to build a test harness into your PHP - (2010-03-16)
  [2632] Shipping a test harness with your class in PHP - (2010-02-12)
  [1549] http, https and ajp - comparison and choice - (2008-02-22)
  [1515] Keeping staff up to date on hotel room status - (2008-01-22)
  [1505] Script to present commonly used images - PHP - (2008-01-13)
  [1496] PHP / Web 2 logging - (2008-01-06)
  [1495] Single login and single threaded models - Java and PHP - (2008-01-04)
  [1485] Copyright and theft of images, bandwidth and members. - (2007-12-26)
  [1379] Simple page password protection - PHP - (2007-10-04)
  [1355] .php or .html extension? Morally Static Pages - (2007-09-17)
  [1210] PHP header() function - uses and new restrictions - (2007-05-30)
  [1187] Updating a page strictly every minute (PHP, Perl) - (2007-05-14)
  [1183] Improving searches - from OR to AND? - (2007-05-11)
  [1114] PHP Image upload script - (2007-03-21)
  [1009] Passing GET parameters through Apache mod_rewrite - (2006-12-27)
  [936] Global, Superglobal, Session variables - scope and persistance in PHP - (2006-11-21)
  [904] Of course I'll tell you by email - (2006-10-25)
  [847] Image maps for navigation - a straightforward example - (2006-08-28)
  [789] Hot answers in PHP - (2006-07-02)
  [767] Finding the language preference of a web site visitor - (2006-06-18)
  [675] Adding PHP tags to an old cgi program - (2006-04-08)
  [603] PHP - setting sort order with an associative array - (2006-02-13)
  [565] Using PHP to output images, XML, Style sheets, etc - (2006-01-15)
  [542] Morning image, afternoon image - (2005-12-26)
  [537] Daily Image Santafied - (2005-12-22)
  [484] Setting the file name for a downloaded document - (2005-11-03)
  [451] Accessing a page via POST from within a PHP script - (2005-09-26)
  [443] Server side scripting of styles to suit the browser - (2005-09-12)
  [425] Caching an XML feed - (2005-08-26)
  [410] Reading a news or blog feed (RSS) in your PHP page - (2005-08-12)
  [376] What brings people to my web site? - (2005-07-13)
  [372] Time calculation in PHP - (2005-07-08)
  [356] Sudoku helper or sudoku cheat - (2005-06-23)
  [345] Spotting a denial of service attack - (2005-06-12)
  [314] What language is this written in? - (2005-05-17)
  [220] When to use Frames - (2005-02-19)

S156 - Interfacing Applications to MySQL Databases
  [3455] MySQL, MySQLi, PDO or something else - how best to talk to databases from PHP - (2011-09-24)
  [3447] Needle in a haystack - finding the web server overload - (2011-09-18)
  [3099] Perl - database access - DBD, DBI and DBIx modules - (2010-12-22)
  [3035] How to display information from a database within a web page - (2010-11-07)
  [2790] Joining a MySQL table from within a Python program - (2010-06-02)
  [2745] Connecting Python to sqlite and MySQL databases - (2010-04-28)
  [2381] Checking the database connection manually - (2009-08-28)
  [2263] Mysqldump fails as a cron job - a work around - (2009-06-30)
  [1885] Hiding a MySQL database behind a web page - (2008-11-15)
  [1561] Uploading to a MySQL database through PHP - examples and common questions - (2008-03-02)
  [1450] Easy selection of multiple SQL conditions from PHP - (2007-11-30)
  [1381] Using a MySQL database to control mod_rewrite via PHP - (2007-10-06)
  [723] Viewing images held in a MySQL database via PHP - (2006-05-17)
  [663] Python to MySQL - (2006-03-31)
  [644] Using a MySQL database from Perl - (2006-03-13)
  [104] mysql_connect or mysql_pconnect in PHP? - (2004-10-30)

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Paging Martin Noke, who petitions for more trains from Trowbridge to Swindon
Evening drive across the roof of Wiltshire
Terms and Conditions - Hotel, England - plain English
Flipping images on your web page
Downloading data for use in Excel (from PHP / MySQL)
Python - formatting objects
Pictures you can use - for free - from our library
Autovivification - the magic appearance of variables in Perl
Perl, PHP or Python? No - Perl AND PHP AND Python!