Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Foursquare Data with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for Foursquare provides formulas that can query Foursquare data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Foursquare 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 Foursquare data records you want to retrieve, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as APIConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Foursquare data, separated by semicolons.

  Using API Key Authentication

  Foursquare Places API uses Service Key (Bearer token) authentication. To obtain a Service Key:

  1. Go to the Foursquare Developer Console at https://foursquare.com/developers/
  2. Create a new project or select an existing one
  3. Navigate to the API Keys section
  4. Generate a new Service Key for the Places API

  After setting the following connection properties, you are ready to connect:

  • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
  • ServiceKey: Set this to your Foursquare Service Key obtained from the Developer Console.
  • XPlacesApiVersion: (Optional) Set this to the API version date. Defaults to 2025-06-17.

  Example APIKey connection string

  Profile=C:\profiles\Foursquare.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_personal_access_token';
  

• 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 Foursquare data, such as Query.
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 Autocomplete WHERE Query = '"&B5&"'","Profile="&B1&";AuthScheme="&B2&";ProfileSettings="&B3&";Provider=API",B6)

👁 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.)