Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Google Sheets Data with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as GoogleSheetsConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Google Sheets data, separated by semicolons.

  You can connect to a spreadsheet by providing authentication to Google and then setting the Spreadsheet connection property to the name or feed link of the spreadsheet. If you want to view a list of information about the spreadsheets in your Google Drive, execute a query to the Spreadsheets view after you authenticate.

  ClientLogin (username/password authentication) has been officially deprecated since April 20, 2012 and is now no longer available. Instead, use the OAuth 2.0 authentication standard. To access Google APIs on behalf on individual users, you can use the embedded credentials or you can register your own OAuth app.

  OAuth also enables you to use a service account to connect on behalf of users in a Google Apps domain. To authenticate with a service account, register an application to obtain the OAuth JWT values.

  See the Getting Started chapter in the help documentation to connect to Google Sheets from different types of accounts: Google accounts, Google Apps accounts, and accounts using two-step verification.

• 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 Google Sheets data, such as ShipCity.
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 Orders WHERE ShipCity = '"&B3&"'","Spreadsheet="&B1&";InitiateOAuth="&B2&";Provider=GoogleSheets",B4)

👁 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.)