Reading large excel file with PHP

Question

I'm trying to read a 17MB excel file (2003) with PHPExcel1.7.3c, but it crushes already while loading the file, after exceeding the 120 seconds limit I have. Is there another library that can do it more efficiently? I have no need in styling, I only need it to support UTF8. Thanks for your help

Answer 1

Filesize isn't a good measure when using PHPExcel, it's more important to get some idea of the number of cells (rowsxcolumns) in each worksheet.

If you have no need for styling, are you calling:

$objReader->setReadDataOnly(true);

before loading the file?

If you don't need to access all worksheets, or only certain cells within a worksheet, look at using

$objReader->setLoadSheetsOnly(array(1,2))

or

$objReader->setLoadSheetsOnly(1)

or defining a readFilter

Are you using cell caching? If so, what method? That slows down the load time.