title: PHPExcel treats first rows as empty although they contain data
body: <p>In this following script I'm getting an error that the first 4 rows are empty although I'm using <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/25322282/Book1.xlsx" rel="nofollow">this spreadsheet</a> which contains data.</p>
  
  <p>Please have a look and suggest what the problem might be:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$objPHPExcel = PHPExcel_IOFactory::load($path);
  $objWorksheet = $objPHPExcel-&gt;setActiveSheetIndex(0);
  
      $highestRow = $objWorksheet-&gt;getHighestRow();
      $highestColumn = $objWorksheet-&gt;getHighestColumn();
      $highestColumnIndex = PHPExcel_Cell::columnIndexFromString($highestColumn);
      $nrColumns = ord($highestColumn) - 64;
      $addedtags=0;
      $begin_row=2; // 1st line of data in excel file
  
      for ($row = $begin_row; $row &lt;= $highestRow;  $row++) {
          $val=array();
          for ($col=0; $col &lt; $highestColumnIndex; $col++) {
              $cell = $objWorksheet-&gt;getCellByColumnAndRow($col, $row);
              $val[] = $cell-&gt;getValue();
          }
  
          if ($val[0]&lt;&gt;'') { //check that row contains data before inserting
              $sql1 = sprintf("INSERT INTO ".$dbprefix."terms (name , slug, term_group) VALUES (%s, %s, %s)",
                 GetSQLValueString($val[0], "text"),
                 GetSQLValueString($val[1], "text"), 
                 GetSQLValueString(0, "int"));
              $result = mysql_query($sql1) or die(mysql_error());
              echo '&lt;br /&gt;Added: '.$val[0];
          } else {
              echo '&lt;br /&gt;Error: Line '.$row.' was empty...';
          }
      } 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm using PHPExcel version 1.7.6.</p>