And more.

While I was typing that last post, Child came in and said, "I need to vent some frustrations." She had three different companies she's trying to call (to give them money!), and 5 different phone numbers between them. No one answered.

Seriously, businesses. Do you honestly feel good running this way? I still think dark thoughts about Comcast, Dell, and Brent Brown auto, whose reps at various times misled, lied, and simply hung up on me.

3 for 3

Three companies, three problems, one day! I'm on a roll!

With this company, my online account was having problems. The customer rep I called said they knew about the problem and that it only affected certain accounts, but their systems were down so she couldn't transfer me to the person who could fix the problem. Her advice was to "wait another billing cycle and see if the problem's still there."

Their system was also down the last time I called, a month ago. Either they have a terrible system, or it's a convenient excuse to avoid doing anything.

If I ever start a company, "customer service" isn't going to be a PR phrase, it's going to be a top priority.

Would Not Buy Again.

So three weeks ago, Child had me buy a birthday present for her friend's son. I bought it off eBay from oddbanana, a power seller with a 99.2% positive rating out of almost 100,000 ratings. I didn't think I'd have any problems. Boy was I wrong.

Three weeks, no present, an email, and two support requests later, I opened a PayPal dispute for "non-receipt of item". It took a couple days, but oddbanana refunded the money through PayPal (all $15.50 of it), with no comment or message.

One minute later, according to my emails, they opened an eBay "Unpaid Item case" for the same item.

Wow. Just...wow. The only explanation for the whole fiasco that I can think of is that they're using some sort of malfunctioning computer system to run everything. Regardless, it's highly frustrating (if not particularly financially debilitating), and I better not get stuck with some "Unpaid Item" mark against me.

PHP-ExcelReader Solutions

PHP-ExcelReader is great for working with Excel spreadsheets in PHP code, but it has a few bugs and tricks. Here's a couple that I've run into, along with solutions.

Problem: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of [varies] bytes exhausted (tried to allocate [varies] bytes) in...

Solution: In my case, I was trying to work with a 1.3 MB file, and PHP-ExcelReader used the full 32 MB of allowable memory before dying. Yeah, apparently it's got memory issues. Anyway, increase the amount of memory allowed to PHP.

First, try adding the following code in your PHP script:
>ini_set("memory_limit", "64M");

If this doesn't correctly up the memory limit, due to some restriction on your host, see if you can edit your php.ini file directly (mine is located /etc/php.ini). Change the line that says "memory_limit = 32M" to something larger, such as "memory_limit = 64M"

Problem: Dates

Solution: My dates showed up in my spreadsheet as 06/03/09, but were obviously stored differently in the backend of Excel. When I would get the value from PHP-ExcelReader, they were simply numbers (39967, in the case of 06/03/09). A little research showed that the numbers were days, offset from (discovered by trial and error) 12/30/1899. Not sure if this will hold for everyone. Anyway, to convert them to proper MySQL date format, I used the following MySQL code:
>FROM_DAYS(39967+TO_DAYS('1899-12-30'))

Problem: Cells missing values

Solution: Perhaps this should be classified more as a warning than as a bug. Then again, warnings don't bite and bugs do, and this bit me.

When reading through the cells in a row, don't use "foreach". The cells will have sequentially numbered keys, but there could be numbers missing!

For example, a row of data in your spreadsheet like so:
aaa bbb ccc ddd eee
--- --- --- --- ---
111 222     444 555

...will result in a row of data like so:

array(1=>111, 2=>222, 4=>444, 5=>555);

Note how if you're sequencing through it with "foreach", expecting to get a blank value for key "3", you won't get it.

Old code: foreach ($row as $col_num=>$cell)
New code: for ($i=1; $i <= $num_cols; $i++)