Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula



Pull data, automate spreadsheets, and more with the QUERY formula.

The CData Excel Add-In for Smartsheet provides formulas that can edit, save, and delete Smartsheet data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Smartsheet 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 Smartsheet data records you want to retrieve or the modifications to be made, written in standard SQL.
  • Connection: Either the connection name, such as SmartsheetConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Smartsheet data, separated by semicolons.

    Smartsheet uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, you will need to register an app to obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL connection properties.

    However, for testing purposes you can instead use the Personal Access Token you get when you create an application; set this to the OAuthAccessToken connection property.

  • 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 Smartsheet data, such as Assigned.
  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.
  3. =CDATAQUERY("SELECT * FROM Sheet_Event_Plan_Budget WHERE Assigned = '"&B4&"'","OAuthClientId="&B1&";OAuthClientSecret="&B2&";CallbackURL="&B3&";Provider=Smartsheet",B5)
  4. Change the filter to change the data.

Ready to get started?

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The Smartsheet Excel Add-In is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with live data from Smartsheet, directly from Microsoft Excel.

Use Excel to connect to Smartsheet Sheets, Contacts, Folders, Groups, Users, etc. Perfect for Excel based data analysis, data cleansing & de-duplication, and more!