Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Pushbullet Data with the QUERY Formula

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

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

    Using API Key Authentication

    Pushbullet uses token-based authentication (Access Token). To obtain an Access Token:

    1. Log in to your Pushbullet account at https://www.pushbullet.com
    2. Navigate to Settings > Account
    3. Click "Create Access Token"
    4. Copy the generated token

    After obtaining your Access Token, set the following connection properties:

    • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
    Set the following in the ProfileSettings connection property:
    • APIKey: Set this to your Pushbullet Access Token.

    Example Connection String

    Profile=C:\profiles\Pushbullet.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_access_token;';AuthScheme=APIKey;
    

    Connecting to Pushbullet

    Once the authentication is configured, you can connect to Pushbullet and query data from any of the available tables such as Users, Pushes, Devices, Chats, Subscriptions, and Channels.

  • 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 Pushbullet data, such as .
  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 Users WHERE  = '"&B5&"'","Profile="&B1&";ProfileSettings="&B2&";'="&B3&";AuthScheme="&B4&";Provider=API",B6)
  4. Change the filter to change the data.

Ready to get started?

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