I have a form created in Microsoft Word that I need to fill in via PHP. I have looked at PHPWord, but it looks like you can only create Word documents with it. I considered exporting the form to XML and editing it that way, but the formatting gets screwy from the export. Is there another way?
At the time of writing this, there is no direct solution.
You might want to have a look at the best answer for Create Word Document using PHP in Linux to get a hint (uses OpenOffice documents that you can change since they are XML+ZIP, and converts opendocument to .doc on cmdline).
Another alternative is - if you run your script on a windows server - to use the COM interface to speak with Word. See http://drewd.com/2007/01/25/reading-from-a-word-document-with-com-in-php for an example to read a file, and - by digging through the Word COM API - you can also change existing documents.