Excel Spreadsheet Automation on FreshBooks Data with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for FreshBooks provides formulas that can query FreshBooks data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search FreshBooks 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 FreshBooks 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 FreshBooks data, separated by semicolons.

  Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the FreshBooks Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\FreshBooks.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for FreshBooks (see below).

  FreshBooks API Profile Settings

  Register an OAuth application in your FreshBooks Developer Dashboard to obtain a Client ID and Client Secret, and configure the redirect URI to match your application's callback URL.

• 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 FreshBooks data, such as AccountId.
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 Invoices WHERE AccountId = '"&B7&"'","Profile="&B1&";Authscheme="&B2&";OAuthClientId="&B3&";OAuthClientSecret="&B4&";CallbackUrl="&B5&";InitiateOAuth="&B6&";Provider=API",B8)

👁 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.)