PHPExcel taking an extremely long time to read Excel file

Question

I\'m using PHPExcel 1.7.8, PHP 5.4.14, Windows 7, and an Excel 2007 spreadsheet. The spreadsheet consists of 750 rows, columns A through BW, and is about 600KB in size. This

Answer 1

PHPExcel has a problem with identifying where the end of your excel file is. Or rather, Excel has a hard time knowing where the end of itself is. If you touch a cell at A:1000000 it thinks it needs to read that far.

I have done 2 things in the past to fix this:

1) Cut and past the data you need into new excel file. 2) Specify the exact dimensions you want to read.

Edit How to do option 2

public function readExcelDataToArray($excelFilePath, $maxRowNumber=-1, $maxColumnNumber=-1)
{
    $objPHPExcel = PHPExcel_IOFactory::load($excelFilePath);
    $objWorksheet = $objPHPExcel->getActiveSheet();

    //Get last row and column that have data
    if ($maxRowNumber == -1){
    $lastRow = $objWorksheet->getHighestDataRow();
    } else {
        $lastRow = $maxRowNumber;
    }

    if ($maxColumnNumber == -1){
        $lastCol = $objWorksheet->getHighestDataColumn();
        //Change Column letter to column number
        $lastCol = PHPExcel_Cell::columnIndexFromString($lastCol);      
    } else {
        $lastCol = $maxColumnNumber;
    }   

    //Get Data Array
    $dataArray = array();

    for ($currentRow = 1; $currentRow <= $lastRow; $currentRow++){
        for ($currentCol = 0; $currentCol <= $lastCol; $currentCol++){
            $dataArray[$currentRow][$currentCol] = $objWorksheet->getCellByColumnAndRow($currentCol,, $currentRow)->getValue();
        }
    }
    return $dataArray;
}

Unfortunately these solutions aren't very dynamic.

Note that a modern excel file is really just a zip with an xlsx extension. I have written extensions to PHPExcel that unzip them, and modify certain xml files to get the kinds of behaviors I want.

A third suggestion for you would be to monitor the contents of each row and stop when you get an empty one.