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URL: https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/hackernews-excel-cdataquery.rst

⇱ Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Hacker News Data with the QUERY Formula

Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Hacker News Data with the QUERY Formula

👁 Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Pull data from Hacker News, automate spreadsheets, and more with the QUERY formula.

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

    Connecting to HackerNews

    The HackerNews API (powered by Firebase) is a public API that requires no authentication. You can connect and query data immediately without any credentials.

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

    • AuthScheme: Set this to None.

    Example connection string:

    Profile=C:\profiles\HackerNews.apip;AuthScheme=None
  • 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 Hacker News data, such as .
  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.
    3. =CDATAQUERY("SELECT * FROM TopStories WHERE = '"&B3&"'","Profile="&B1&";AuthScheme="&B2&";Provider=API",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.)