Excel Spreadsheet Automation on QuickBooks Online Data with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for QuickBooks Online provides formulas that can edit, save, and delete QuickBooks Online data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search QuickBooks Online data for a user-specified value and then organize the results into an Excel spreadsheet.

Getting Started

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The syntax of the CDATAQUERY formula is the following:

=CDATAQUERY(Query, [Connection], [Parameters], [ResultLocation]);

This formula requires three inputs:

• Query: The declaration of the QuickBooks Online data records you want to retrieve or the modifications to be made, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as QuickBooksOnlineConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to QuickBooks Online data, separated by semicolons.

  QuickBooks Online uses the OAuth authentication standard. OAuth requires the authenticating user to log in through the browser. To authenticate using OAuth, you can use the embedded OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL or you can obtain your own by registering an app with Intuit. Additionally, if you want to connect to sandbox data, set UseSandbox to true.

  See the Getting Started chapter of the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

• 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 QuickBooks Online data, such as FullyQualifiedName.
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 Customers WHERE FullyQualifiedName = '"&B2&"'","InitiateOAuth="&B1&";Provider=QuickBooksOnline",B3)

👁 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.)