Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for Cloudant provides formulas that can edit, save, and delete Cloudant data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Cloudant data for a user-specified value and then organize the results into an Excel spreadsheet.

The syntax of the CDATAQUERY formula is the following: =CDATAQUERY(Query, [Connection], [Parameters], [ResultLocation]);

This formula requires three inputs:

• Query: The declaration of the Cloudant data records you want to retrieve or the modifications to be made, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as CloudantConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Cloudant data, separated by semicolons.

  Set the following connection properties to connect to Cloudant:

  • User: Set this to your username.
  • Password: Set this to your password.
• ResultLocation: The cell that the output of results should start from.

Pass Spreadsheet Cells as Inputs to the Query

The procedure below results in a spreadsheet that organizes all the formula inputs in the first column.

1. Define cells for the formula inputs. In addition to the connection inputs, add another input to define a criterion for a filter to be used to search Cloudant data, such as MovieRating.
2. In another cell, write the formula, referencing the cell values from the user input cells defined above. Single quotes are used to enclose values such as addresses that may contain spaces.
=CDATAQUERY("SELECT * FROM Movies WHERE MovieRating = '"&B3&"'","User="&B1&";Password="&B2&";Provider=Cloudant",B4)
3. Change the filter to change the data.