Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Azure Analysis Services Data with the QUERY Formula

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

• Connection: Either the connection name, such as AASConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Azure Analysis Services data, separated by semicolons.

  To connect to Azure Analysis Services, set the Url property to a valid server, for instance, asazure://southcentralus.asazure.windows.net/server, in addition to authenticating. Optionally, set Database to distinguish which Azure database on the server to connect to.

  Azure Analysis Services uses the OAuth authentication standard. OAuth requires the authenticating user to interact with Azure Analysis Services using the browser. You can connect without setting any connection properties for your user credentials. See the Help documentation for more information.

• 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 Azure Analysis Services data, such as Country.
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 Customer WHERE Country = '"&B3&"'","URL="&B1&";InitiateOAuth="&B2&";Provider=AAS",B4)


3. Change the filter to change the data.