Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for TaxJar provides formulas that can edit, save, and delete TaxJar data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search TaxJar 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 TaxJar data records you want to retrieve or the modifications to be made, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as TaxJarConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to TaxJar data, separated by semicolons.

  To authenticate to the TaxJar API, you will need to first obtain the API Key from the TaxJar UI.

  NOTE: the API is available only for Professional and Premium TaxJar plans.

  If you already have a Professional or Premium plan you can find the API Key by logging in the TaxJar UI and navigating to Account -> TaxJar API. After obtaining the API Key, you can set it in the APIKey connection property.

  Additional Notes

  • By default, the CData connector will retrieve data of the last 3 months in cases where the entity support date range filtering. You can set StartDate to specify the minimum creation date of the data retrieved.
  • If the API Key has been created for a sandbox API account please set UseSandbox to true, but not all endpoints will work as expected. For more information, refer to the TaxJar developer documentation.
• 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 TaxJar data, such as TransactionID.
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 Orders WHERE TransactionID = '"&B2&"'","APIKey="&B1&";Provider=TaxJar",B3)
3. Change the filter to change the data.