[thelist] Reading values from Excel in PHP

[David Bindel]

I'm making a community website for guitarists who use a
certain guitar technology (GeNetX) with a MySQL database
that is very large in terms of columns (more than 100).  The
database will be used for storing preset values for GeNetX
guitar processors.

I have created a VERY large HTML form made for adding these
presets, but the current "standard" for distributing these
presets is in the form of an Excel spreadsheet where the
cells with necessary values always exist in the same
location (i.e. "Volume" is always in cell A4, so PHP grabs
the value in A4 from the Excel file and inserts it into the
database).

I'm wondering if there is a way for users to upload an Excel
preset file and have PHP open, read the values, and insert
the necessary values into the database.

I have looked for quite a while on ways to do this, but all
I have found is websites teaching people how to fake
Internet Explorer into thinking the page is an Excel file.

TIA,
David Bindel