Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Dropbox Data with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as DropboxConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Dropbox data, separated by semicolons.

  Dropbox uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, you can use the embedded credentials or register an app with Dropbox.

  See the Getting Started guide in the CData driver documentation for more information.

• 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 Dropbox data, such as Id.
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 Id = '"&B2&"'","InitiateOAuth="&B1&";Provider=Dropbox",B3)

👁 Formula inputs used in this example. (Google Apps is shown.)

3. Change the filter to change the data. 👁 The outputs of the formula. (Google Apps is shown.)