PHP processes more Excel files than any language except maybe Python. Payroll exports, inventory imports, financial reports, data migrations. If your business runs on spreadsheets (and it does), your PHP app touches them constantly. The standard approach is PhpSpreadsheet: a pure-PHP library that parses XML, builds an in-memory object graph, and promptly devours your server's RAM. It works fine for small files. It falls apart the moment someone uploads a 50,000-row export from SAP. (Don't ask me how I know. 😢) php_excel takes a different path. It's a PHP extension that wraps LibXL, a commercial C/C++ library purpose-built for reading and writing Excel files. Unlike most alternatives, LibXL handles both modern xlsx (Office 2007+) and the legacy xls binary format (Excel 97-2003), so you don't need separate codepaths for old and new files. Instead of parsing XML in userland PHP, every cell read and write is a single C function call. In my benchmarks it's 7-10x faster than PhpSpreadsheet, and its memory f...