Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for Amazon S3 provides formulas that can query Amazon S3 data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Amazon S3 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 Amazon S3 data records you want to retrieve, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as AmazonS3Connection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Amazon S3 data, separated by semicolons.

  To authorize Amazon S3 requests, provide the credentials for an administrator account or for an IAM user with custom permissions. Set AccessKey to the access key Id. Set SecretKey to the secret access key.

  Note: You can connect as the AWS account administrator, but it is recommended to use IAM user credentials to access AWS services.

  For information on obtaining the credentials and other authentication methods, refer to the Getting Started section of 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 Amazon S3 data, such as Name.
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 ObjectsACL WHERE Name = '"&B3&"'","AccessKey="&B1&";SecretKey="&B2&";Provider=AmazonS3",B4)
3. Change the filter to change the data.