A lot of users who want to install this office suite will undoubtedly be from a business background. This is for obvious reasons – the suite provides a large amount of business tools that can help any organisation to make sure it plans well and gives them an effective way of communicating data and ideas, for example written documents and spreadsheets. There is another type of person though, probably less common to Open Office, but they are interested in the software package. These are the web developers, the people who build sites that we all take for granted, who put in huge amounts of time to make simple systems operate properly. In this article, we’re going to talk about a tool that they can use to help them.
So, what could web developers need from this software suite that it cannot currently offer? Well something that a lot of people who build websites would like is the ability to automatically generate documents on-the-go rather than having to create it all manually. To give a few examples of what this could be used for, if an order system was in place then a receipt document could be e-mailed to the end user after they have purchased something. They would then be able to open the document in this office suite and be able to see all of the information relating to their order. This is something that would probably be very difficult to do you might think – but you’re wrong. A library called OdtPHP exists which takes out the hard work for you.
OdtPHP is an object-orietated PHP library which allows you to generate Open Office documents whenever you want using simple PHP functions. You don’t even need to have the office suite installed on the computer or server that you’re running it on. It is currently available for systems running PHP 5 and above so if you’re running on something older you really do need to get your system administrator to upgrade it to the more recent versions to take advantage of libraries such as this. It’s completely free and simple to install for those with experience with dealing with libraries, you will have to have certain permissions to use this which in a business environment you may not have yourself.
If you’re interested in how it works, basically you give the library a valid template document (a word document with some default tags placed in) and then this library will allow you to change the placeholder text with whatever you want it to be, it can be generated or calculated using any PHP. This is something that is only useful for web developers as we mentioned originally, if this isn’t what you do then you’ll probably find no use for this library at all. However, this will prove to be very handy for those who need a solution to this problem that a lot of people have encountered. It can be a huge aid to any business and can increase the amount of automation, resulting in less manual work to do.
In conclusion, OdtPHP is a very helpful library that we recommend to all businesses, although you will need a professional developer to put it into action because it isn’t for everyone. You’ll be able to find the files for this by searching on Google or going to the official website. It’s still a good idea to install our Open Office download and thoroughly test the documents it produces just to make sure you’re happy with the results it returns though, you really don’t want any mistakes to occur with a system such as this. Most people who have this are very happy with what it does, though.