There’s a very simple method for getting data into Excel from the Web that’s surprisingly little known. Most people use csv, which works well, but has problems with UTF-8. I originally saw this on xml.com (see the Rendering Machinery section).

So here it is: you simply have to set the content type for your page to application/vnd.ms-excel and put your data into an html table. It works quite well, even maintaining formatting, colors, etc.

Here’s an example in php, and here is the script in action.