Excel Spreadsheet Automation on RSS Feeds with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as RSSConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to RSS feeds, separated by semicolons.

  You can connect to RSS and Atom feeds, as well as feeds with custom extensions. To connect to a feed, set the URL property. You can also access secure feeds. A variety of authentication mechanisms are supported. See the help documentation for details.

• 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 RSS feeds, such as Category.
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 Latest News WHERE Category = '"&B2&"'","URI="&B1&";Provider=RSS",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.)