Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Instagram Data with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as InstagramConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Instagram data, separated by semicolons.

  Instagram uses the OAuth 2 authentication standard. Obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL by registering an app with Instagram. See the help documentation for a guide.

• 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 Instagram data, such as TagName.
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 Media WHERE TagName = '"&B5&"'","OAuthClientId="&B1&";OAuthClientSecret="&B2&";CallbackURL="&B3&";InitiateOAuth="&B4&";Provider=Instagram",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.)