Why am I getting an “invalid or unitialized Zip object” error when trying to read excel file via PHP?

Question

I would like to find out how to read an excel file using via PHP. My specific use case is using PHPExcel from within Yii.

I have followed numerous tu

Answer 1

I had the same error message, but turned out to be an issue with file permissions (as suggested here: PHPExcel Warning: ZipArchive::getFromName(): Invalid or unitialized Zip object in).

A quick chmod 644 on the Excel file fixed it.