Excel

If you find that the really handy Excel spreadsheet import feature for MySQL is missing in PHPMyAdmin, it's because it has been removed. According to the PHPMyAdmin changelog:
3.4.5.0 (2011-09-14)
- [core] Remove library PHPExcel, due to license issues
- [export] Remove native Excel export modules (xls and xlsx formats)
- [import] Remove native Excel import modules (xls and xlsx formats)

If you're importing Open Office / Libre Office Calc files or Excel spreadsheets into MySQL using PHPMyAdmin, you might have run into the occasional case where the process hangs with either a partially imported set or no records at all. After some messing around, I have found that this usually happens when there's a problem with the input data. In my case, this usually stemmed from duplicate primary keys or similar issues. Unique keys were detected fine.

In other words, PEBKAC.