Sometimes, you need to give a web user a spreadsheet so they can work
with the data themselves. Rather than emailing a spreadsheet, here's
another approach outlined in Microsoft's knowledge base article
Q198703.
by Mark Henri
With a combination of an automated web server and some simple VBScript,
you can output information from a web server into an Excel document.
Of course, your end user must have Excel installed, but in corporate
environments, this sort of presentation is very practical.
Start by examining this web page by clicking on View | Source in your
browser. Notice the use of VBScript tags and the way it's opening
an Excel spreadsheet object and populating it with data.
Using ASP or PHP, output the data from your database in a format that
builds an Excel document. That's all there is to it.