Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Guru Data with the QUERY Formula

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

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

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

    Guru API Profile Settings

    In Guru, navigate to Settings > API and click Create New API Token. Use your email address as the User and the generated token as the Password.

  • 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 Guru data, such as TeamId.
  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 Analytics WHERE TeamId = '"&B5&"'","Profile="&B1&";ProfileSettings="&B2&";Password="&B3&";Provider=API",B6)
  4. Change the filter to change the data.

Ready to get started?

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