Access Live BigCommerce Data in Excel (Desktop)

Microsoft Excel is a widely used spreadsheet software application, primarily used for tasks related to data management, analysis, and visualization. When combined with CData Connect Cloud, you gain immediate access to BigCommerce data directly within Excel, facilitating data analysis, collaboration, calculations, and more.This article shows how to connect to BigCommerce in your Connect Cloud instance and access and update live BigCommerce data in Excel spreadsheets.

CData Connect Cloud provides a pure cloud-to-cloud interface for BigCommerce, allowing you to easily access live BigCommerce data in Excel for the web. Simply use the Connect Cloud Add-In to query live data (or write your own). Using optimized data processing out of the box, CData Connect Cloud pushes all supported query operations (filters, JOINs, etc) directly to BigCommerce, leveraging server-side processing to quickly return BigCommerce data.

Configure BigCommerce Connectivity for Excel

Connectivity to BigCommerce from Excel is made possible through CData Connect Cloud. To work with BigCommerce data from Excel, we start by creating and configuring a BigCommerce connection.

1. Log into Connect Cloud, click Connections and click Add Connection
2. Select "BigCommerce" from the Add Connection panel
3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to BigCommerce.

   BigCommerce authentication is based on the standard OAuth flow. To authenticate, you must initially create an app via the Big Commerce developer platform where you can obtain an OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL. These three parameters will be set as connection properties to your driver.

   Additionally, in order to connect to your BigCommerce Store, you will need your StoreId. To find your Store Id please follow these steps:

   1. Log in to your BigCommerce account.
   2. From the Home Page, select Advanced Settings > API Accounts.
   3. Click Create API Account.
   4. A text box named API Path will appear on your screen.
   5. Inside you can see a URL of the following structure: https://api.bigcommerce.com/stores/{Store Id}/v3.
   6. As demonstrated above, your Store Id will be between the 'stores/' and '/v3' path paramters.
   7. Once you have retrieved your Store Id you can either click Cancel or proceed in creating an API Account in case you do not have one already.
4. Click Create & Test
5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add BigCommerce Connection page and update the User-based permissions.

With the connection configured, you are ready to connect to BigCommerce data from Excel.

Access Live BigCommerce Data in Excel

The steps below outline connecting to CData Connect Cloud from Excel to access live BigCommerce data.

1. Open Excel, create a new sheet (or open an existing one).
2. Click Insert and click Get Add-ins. (if you have already installed the Add-In, jump to step 4).
3. Search for CData Connect Cloud Add-In and install the Add-in.
4. Click Data and open the CData Connect Cloud Add-In.
5. In the Add-In panel, click Authorize to authenticate with your CData Connect Cloud instance
6. In the CData Connect Cloud panel in Excel, click Import
7. Choose a Connection (e.g. BigCommerce1), Table (e.g. Customers), and Columns to import
8. Optionally add Filters, Sorting, and a Limit
9. Click Execute to import the data

Update BigCommerce Data from Excel

In addition to viewing BigCommerce data in Excel, CData Connect Cloud also lets you update and delete BigCommerce data. Begin by importing data (as described above).

1. Update any cell or cells with changes you want to push to BigCommerce (your changes will be in red)
2. In the CData Connect Cloud Add-In panel, select Update
3. Optionally highlight the cell(s) you wish to update and select an update option ("Update All" or "Update Selected")
4. Click Execute to push the updates to BigCommerce

A notification will appear when the update is complete

Live Access to BigCommerce Data from Cloud Applications

New, you have a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to live BigCommerce data from your Excel workbook. You can add more data to your workbook for calculations, aggregations, collaboration, and more.

Try CData Connect Cloud and get real-time data access to 100+ SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources directly from your cloud applications.