Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Apify Data with the QUERY Formula

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Pull data from Apify, automate spreadsheets, and more with the QUERY formula.

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

    Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the Apify Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Apify.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Apify (see below).

    Apify API Profile Settings

    Obtain your API token from the Apify Console by navigating to Settings and generating a new API 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 Apify data, such as Status.
  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 ActorBuilds WHERE Status = '"&B4&"'","Profile="&B1&";ProfileSettings="&B2&";Provider=API",B5)
  4. Change the filter to change the data.

Ready to get started?

Connect to live data from Apify with the API Driver

Connect to Apify