Recently I’ve had to import a client’s catalog data from Excel 2007 to the Magento eCommerce Platform. The data in Excel was unsurprisingly in a format that was unsupported by Magento’s import methods. Using code, I needed to parse Excel data into the format Magento required. In PHP, I wasn’t aware of any way to interface with .xls or .xlsx files, so I tried exporting the data to flat-file CSV, where it could be easily manipulated using PHP’s native CSV functions.
