Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Telegram Data with the QUERY Formula

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

  Using API Key Authentication

  Telegram uses Bot Tokens to authenticate API requests. You can obtain a Bot Token by creating a bot via BotFather on Telegram (https://t.me/BotFather). Once created, BotFather will provide a token in the format

  123456789:ABCdefGhIJKlmNoPQRsTUVwxyZ

  .

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

  • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
  • APIKey: Set this to your Telegram Bot Token obtained from BotFather.

  Example connection string

  Profile=C:\profiles\Telegram.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_bot_token';
  

• 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 Telegram 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.

=CDATAQUERY("SELECT * FROM AvailableGifts WHERE = '"&B4&"'","Profile="&B1&";ProfileSettings="&B2&";Provider=API",B5)

👁 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.)