excel+php

[Tess James]

can we go for ms excel for creating charts in php(with mysql) instead of using jpgraph?
please tell me which is the easiest one to use 9between ms excel and jpgraph)?

[digital-ether]

can we go for ms excel for creating charts in php(with mysql) instead of using jpgraph?
please tell me which is the easiest one to use 9between ms excel and jpgraph)?

This really depends on what you need the charts for and how you want to generate them.

If you create them with MS excel you'll need to export them as a format ready for the web. If you can do that then it should be quite simple, yet involve manual exporting and generation of graphs. If you wanted to automate excel to produce the graphs you'd have to use VB Script or C++ or something like that. You could probably use PHP but it wouldn't be the best suited.

If you use Jpgraph it will have the benefits that you can generate graphs dynamically. You can have PHP retrieve the data from a database, flat file, etc. and automatically generate the graphs.

I'd suggest looking at some Flash Charting scripts. They offer interactive charts as opposed to the static images generated by PHP.
You can use PHP to generate the input for the flash charting script. Normally these will take an XML format, which is quite easy to work with.

See:
http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart/
http://www.fusioncharts.com/

[digital-ether]

I've worked with fusion charts and I'd recommend it. It has a PHP API on top of the JavaScript API on top of their Flash API.
So you can use either API. The PHP generates Javascript that calls the Flash API that generates the charts.
If you're familiar with JavaScript you can just call the javascript API as it has more flexibility.