Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Microsoft OneDrive Data with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as OneDriveConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Microsoft OneDrive data, separated by semicolons.

  OneDrive uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, create an app to obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL connection properties. See the OAuth section of the Help documentation for an authentication 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 Microsoft OneDrive data, such as Id.
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 Files WHERE Id = '"&B5&"'","OAuthClientId="&B1&";OAuthClientSecret="&B2&";OAuthCallbackURL="&B3&";InitiateOAuth="&B4&";Provider=OneDrive",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.)