NYCPHP Meetup

[-sry]

 Hiya,
 
 I've been out of the loop a lot the past year and even though
I've moved across 3 states, I still don't have internet access
of my own where I live. BUT in this great world of ours, I
can and do have local installations of Apache/1.3.31 (Win32) 
 and PHP 4.3.8 (yes, I know 5.0 is out there) installed and
tested (using the php_info() to get a page) and it's all working
as expected (except for vhosts which I think is an Apache-on
Windoze issue I'm not going to solve in this life)
 
I've been working on a site for a friend and he and I are
scheming to "prove" on his site that his boss is making a
big deal out of nothing. The site is an internet radio station
and they run contests. Sometimes they get one or two entries,
sometimes 500 or 1000 in a week. The problem is to have 
the entry form dump all its data into an excel spreadsheet
so my friend can just email that "finished product" to the
record label sponsoring the contest. I have a gut feeling this
is a snap to do but I don't have a clue where to start. Right
now, my friend's boss has each individual email sent one at
a time to him using some Yahoo! free form mail scriptwannabe
thingy. It's making him nuts on the current contest which is
easily going to get 4-digit entries that he has to manually
enter into Excel to send to the record labels.
 
Help!! clue me in on the logic, algorithmic thinking of this
behind the scenes action and if there's a module or class
out there to help me, please point me to the URL.

My friend won't care if the PHP script emails him or not
each time there's an entry. Just writing to the Excel file for
each entry is fine if at the end of the contest, he can push a
button to get the Excel file attached to an email and emailed
to him. He is not "allowed" FTP access to the site so he
can't just go get it once it's all written. Oh, and I also had
suggested he just have their contractor web developer
output the form data to a flat text file, space or comma
delimited lines that he could at least import into Excel by
hand. He'd be happy with that, too, but the boss says 
that also is "not possible." Kinda funny boss, huh?

-sry