README

What is it all about?
---------------------
php_ole is a port of Kawai Takanori's OLE::Storage_Lite Perl package to PHP.
It allows you to access the contents of Microsoft OLE documents which are
mainly used by Microsoft Office.



What can I actually do with it?
-------------------------------
Microsoft Office programs (Word, Excel, etc.) all create files (called OLE
files) with a common structure. These files can be seen as small
filesystems with directories (called storages) and files (called streams).
Thus in order to read the actual contents of such a file you first have to
deal with this OLE container format. php_ole does this job for you - but
only this job! This means that you still have to deal with the application's
file format itself. If you don't know anything about it, php_ole is of no use
for you!

php_ole has been developed for creating files larger than 7 MB with
php_writeexcel. This release has only been tested to do this job, i.e.
only class.ole_pps.php, class.ole_pps_root.php and class.ole_pps_file.php
are supposed to work, and even in these classes most methods are untested
and will probably contain bugs. class.ole_pps_dir.php is untested but
might work. Read support (class.ole.php) is incomplete and will certainly
not work.