Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Pinecone Data with the QUERY Formula

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

  Authentication

  To authenticate to Pinecone, and connect to your own data or to allow other users to connect to their data, you can use API Key authentication.

  Using API Key Authentication

  To authenticate using an API Key, you need to obtain your API Key from your Pinecone console at https://app.pinecone.io/.

  You can then connect by setting the AuthScheme to APIKey and providing your API key:

  • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
  • APIKey: Set this to your API key from Pinecone.

  Example connection strings:

  Standard API Key Configuration:

  Profile=C:\profiles\Pinecone.apip;AuthScheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_api_key;APIVersion=2025-10';
  

• 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 Pinecone data, such as Name.
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 Indexes WHERE Name = '"&B6&"'","Profile="&B1&";AuthScheme="&B2&";ProfileSettings="&B3&";APIVersion="&B4&";Provider=API",B7)


3. Change the filter to change the data.