Here is the quest: How should I use PHP in order to use an application on the server? E.g. - I don't have some program on my local pc and I want to pass some variables to the server's application to process them. Sure - I would like the result too.

Could the common programs (Excel) be accessed via PHP?

I'm not sure that I understand the question completely. PHP can be used to access and generate MS Office documents like Excel and Word. As with anything, there is more than one approach.

.NET or COM would be a likely starting place for building your own solution, .NET objects are available in PHP too, and there are a variety of ways of accessing .NET from PHP, though it does require PHP to be installed along side of the .NET SDK on a Windows machine.

This being a topic far beyond the limits of the P2P forums, here is a place to start:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.com.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.dotnet.php

This documents some of the Microsoft specific functionality of PHP, if this is too broad you can also do a Google search for some basic tutorials or prebuilt solutions that may or may not require PHP to be installed on a Windows operating system...

http://www.google.com/search?q=Gener...l+Document+PHP

or

http://www.google.com/search?q=Acces...l+Document+PHP

HTH!

Regards,
Rich

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The Spicy Peanut Project
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