Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for Office 365 provides formulas that can edit, save, and delete Office 365 data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Office 365 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 Office 365 data records you want to retrieve or the modifications to be made, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as Office365Connection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Office 365 data, separated by semicolons.

  Office 365 uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate requests, you will need to obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and OAuthCallbackURL by registering an app with Office 365. See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

• 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 Office 365 data, such as UserId.
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 Files WHERE UserId = '"&B4&"'","OAuthClientId="&B1&";OAuthClientSecret="&B2&";OAuthCallbackURL="&B3&";Provider=Office365",B5)
3. Change the filter to change the data.