Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Optimizely Data with the QUERY Formula

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

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

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

    Optimizely API Profile Settings

    Generate a personal API token at app.optimizely.com/v2/profile/api in your Optimizely account settings.

  • 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 Optimizely data, such as ProjectId.
  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 Attributes WHERE ProjectId = '"&B4&"'","Profile="&B1&";ProfileSettings="&B2&";Provider=API",B5)
  4. Change the filter to change the data.

Ready to get started?

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