Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Google Tasks Data with the QUERY Formula

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

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

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

    Google Tasks API Profile Settings

    In the Google Cloud Console, enable the Google Tasks API and create OAuth 2.0 credentials to obtain your Client ID and Client Secret.

  • 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 Google Tasks data, such as Title.
  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 TaskLists WHERE Title = '"&B6&"'","Profile="&B1&";Authscheme="&B2&";OAuthClientId="&B3&";OAuthClientSecret="&B4&";CallbackUrl="&B5&";Provider=API",B7)
  4. Change the filter to change the data.

Ready to get started?

Connect to live data from Google Tasks with the API Driver

Connect to Google Tasks