Export: I heard phpMyAdmin can export Microsoft Excel files, how can I enable that ?

Current version does support direct export to Microsoft Excel and Word versions 2000 and newer. If you need export older versions, you can use CSV suitable for Microsoft Excel, which works out of the box or you can try native experimental MS Excel exporter. This export has several problems, most important are limitation of cell content to 255 chars and no support for charsets, so think carefully whether you want to enable this.. For enabling this you need to set $cfg['TempDir'] to place where web server user can write (for example './tmp') and install PEAR module Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer into php include path. The installation can be done by following command:

pear -d preferred_state=beta install -a Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer

First part of switches set we want to install beta version of that module (no stable version available yet) and then we tell pear we want to satisfy dependencies.

If you are running in PHP safe mode, you will have to set in php.ini the safe_mode_include_dir to the directory where your PEAR modules are located, for example:

safe_mode_include_dir = /usr/local/lib/php

To create the temporary directory on a UNIX-based system, you can do:

cd phpMyAdmin
mkdir tmp
chmod o+rwx tmp