Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Twitter Ads Data with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as TwitterAdsConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Twitter Ads data, separated by semicolons.

  All tables require authentication. You must use OAuth to authenticate with Twitter. OAuth requires the authenticating user to interact with Twitter using the browser. For more information, refer to the OAuth section in the Help documentation.

• 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 Twitter Ads data, such as Entity.
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 AdStats WHERE Entity = '"&B2&"'","InitiateOAuth="&B1&";Provider=TwitterAds",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.)