Excel Spreadsheet Automation with the QUERY Formula

The CData Excel Add-In for Zoho Books provides formulas that can query Zoho Books data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Zoho Books 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 Zoho Books data records you want to retrieve, written in standard SQL.

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as ZohoBooksConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Zoho Books data, separated by semicolons.

  Zoho Books uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, create an app to obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL connection properties. See the OAuth section of the Getting Started guide in the Help documentation for an authentication guide.

• 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 Zoho Books data, such as CustomerName.
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 INVOICES WHERE CustomerName = '"&B5&"'","OAuthClientId="&B1&";OAuthClientSecret="&B2&";CallbackURL="&B3&";OrganizationId="&B4&";Provider=ZohoBooks",B6)
3. Change the filter to change the data.