Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for Bing Ads provides formulas that can edit, save, and delete Bing Ads data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Bing 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 Bing Ads data records you want to retrieve or the modifications to be made, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as BingAdsConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Bing Ads data, separated by semicolons.

  The Bing Ads APIs use the OAuth 2 standard. To authenticate, you will need valid Bing Ads OAuth credentials and you will need to obtain a developer token. See the Getting Started section in the Bing Ads data provider help documentation for an authentication guide.

• 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 Bing Ads data, such as CampaignId.
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 AdGroups WHERE CampaignId = '"&B7&"'","OAuthClientId="&B1&";OAuthClientSecret="&B2&";CallbackURL="&B3&";AccountId="&B4&";CustomerId="&B5&";DeveloperToken="&B6&";Provider=BingAds",B8)
3. Change the filter to change the data.