Excel5 writer seems broken when adding many RichText cells.

[vansante]

When creating an Excel5 file with many (>300) RichText cells, Excel seems to have problems opening the file. The generation goes fine and throws no errors. Excel throws an error and cuts off halfway through the spreadsheet. The xlsx file generated by the same code is fine. The PHP versions used are 5.5.5 and 5.4.13.
I have opened the files with Office 2007.

Here is some code to reproduce the bug:

<?php

/** Error reporting */
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', TRUE);
ini_set('display_startup_errors', TRUE);
date_default_timezone_set('Europe/London');

define('EOL',(PHP_SAPI == 'cli') ? PHP_EOL : '<br />');

/** Include PHPExcel */
require_once '../Classes/PHPExcel.php';


// Create new PHPExcel object
echo date('H:i:s') , " Create new PHPExcel object" , EOL;
$objPHPExcel = new PHPExcel();

// Set default font
$objPHPExcel->getDefaultStyle()->getFont()->setName('Arial')
                      ->setSize(10);
$NUM_ROWS = 30;
$NUM_COLS = 8;

for ($row = 0; $row < $NUM_ROWS; $row++) {
    for ($col = 0; $col < $NUM_COLS; $col++) {
        $objRichText = new PHPExcel_RichText();
        $objRichText->createText('Hello World! ' . $row . '.' . $col);

        $objPHPExcel->getActiveSheet()->setCellValueByColumnAndRow($col, $row, $objRichText);
    }
}

$objPHPExcel->getActiveSheet()->setTitle('RichText Test');

// Set active sheet index to the first sheet, so Excel opens this as the first sheet
$objPHPExcel->setActiveSheetIndex(0);


// Save Excel 95 file
echo date('H:i:s') , " Write to Excel5 format" , EOL;
$callStartTime = microtime(true);

$objWriter = PHPExcel_IOFactory::createWriter($objPHPExcel, 'Excel5');
$objWriter->save(str_replace('.php', '.xls', __FILE__));
echo date('H:i:s') , " File written to " , str_replace('.php', '.xls', pathinfo(__FILE__, PATHINFO_BASENAME)) , EOL;

echo 'File has been created in ' , getcwd() , EOL;

[bodinsamuel]

Same problem but happen even faster.

Many style applied to different cells (can't apply by column or row as it's very conditional).
No error, file is generated correctly but style are not applied anymore after the line 20

If I delete some style, the style is applied a little further in the document...

There is no way that I come from memory limit.

[mrsmtvd]

Same problem
Do you find a solution?

[sokollondon]

Same problem

[PowerKiKi]

This is not what you want to hear but xls format was introduced in 1998 and replaced by xlsx in 2007. Today, 10 years later, it should be more than safe to use xlsx instead of xls.