Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

It is amazing that so many users manually key from a report into a spreadsheet for further analysis. PHPExcel is a tool that you can use to write directly to a spreadsheet for them. Here are the steps that you need to take to install and create a simple spreadsheet from DB2 data using PHPExcel.

Getting Started

The following are requirements to use PHPExcel on Power Systems on IBM i:

• Zend Server must be installed and running
• PHPExcel must be downloaded and installed

For the purposes of this

If you like mile-long, messy, obfuscated, hard-to-read SQL, the kind that makes sane people want to cuss and spit on everybody and everything, then this tip is not for you. And please don’t apply for a job in my shop. But if you have better things to do than debug SQL, then I have a simple but clever technique for you.

Suppose the chief bean counter walks into your office and asks for a spreadsheet of general ledger transactions. He wants the current-month transactions for accounts 120, 135, 180, 192, and 198. Here’s how a novice would write the query

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

In my last article we learned about Ruby methods and encapsulation. During the various exercises there were many code changes made and we didn’t really have a simple way to keep track of how the code changed from one version to the next. That’s where source change management (SCM) tools like git come into play and is what we will be diving into today.

The git Website says: “Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large