Dear All,
I am looking for a tool which can help me generate reports and multiple types of charts. Can any one recommend based on their experience? I would like to manage to export minimal to excel and pdf too. I have seen one the php report maker unfortunately it does not have the pdf export functionality.

This one (RLib) is free. There are others that you'll have to pay for and you may find some other free ones with a search.

If you end up creating your own reports, then see my PHP help page (link in signature line below) for info on crating Excel and PDF output.

Member Avatar for iamthwee

For reports, nothing beat crystal reports for ease of connecting to a database and outputting data you want.

For graphs, I would personally recommend the free version of fusion charts. (Which works in flash.) It's pretty good and works on xml.

http://www.fusioncharts.com/free/

Dear Chris,
The RLIB is good unfortunately it does have export to excel. I have tried to search on the Internet too. Do you know of any which I dont mind paying a small amount but have a comprehensive export support like excel,pdf etc.

Dear Wee,
Agree with you about crystal report but on if you developing windows application is quite tough because is very static you have to design the report and it can never be dynamic. I am not sure about php applying it.

Member Avatar for iamthwee

Dear newbie,

Yes crystal might not be suitable for you. There are many libraries for exporting to excel in php.

http://phpexcel.codeplex.com/

Is one such library. So it is just a case of your writing the code to interrogate the database and get the numbers you want out. Also, with free fusion charts, if you right-click the graph you can print this out. Now if the client has a PDFcreator installed they can easily save the charts as a pdf.

Not sure if this is what you are looking for?

I can't compare it with Fusion Charts but Google also provides a chart facility that is quite easy to use (here).

Have a look at my help file for creating Excel output. You may be able to use that in combination with something like RLib.

Dear Wee,
Thank you for the idea is there any link where I can generate pdf from php itself?

Dear Chris,
Where is your help file on the creating excel I do not see it here?

Sorry to posting on so old thread, but please checkout DbFacePHP and take a look.

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