Database Reference
In-Depth Information
The first two lines,
WEB
and
1
, are required by the .IQY specification (more
information about that at
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/
157482
). The third line is the address to send the queries to. In this case,
it is the address of the BigQuery connector query endpoint. The last line
(broken up into three lines to avoid line-wrapping issues) describes the
HTTP POST request to make.
There are three parameters that need to be sent to the connector as part
of the request. If you've been using BigQuery for a while, you probably can
guess what they are:
1. The query that you want to send, for example, SELECT 17
2. The project that will be billed for the queries you run, for example,
bigquery-e2e
3. An authorization key. This is the part that we glossed over on the
original BigQuery Connector landing page.
There is some extra formatting in the .IQY file that tells Excel to prompt for
the data. If you prefer, you could just hard-code your choices in the .IQY
file. If you manage Excel installations in an enterprise setting, for example,
you might want to just set the project ID to your company's project to
save individual users this step. Alternatively, you might want to hard-code
the authorization key so that users don't have to do key management. For
ordinary operation, however, you shouldn't need to modify the .IQY file.
Excel Web Query
Now that you've done the external setup, open Microsoft Excel. These
instructions are based on Microsoft Excel for Mac 2011, but any version
since Excel 97 should work on either Windows or Mac. That said, the menu
options change on virtually every version, so if your UI doesn't match the
screen shots, you might have to do a little more digging to figure out how to
complete the setup.
From the Data menu, select the Get External Data submenu and the Run
Saved Query menu item, as shown in
Figure 12.3
. This brings up a file open
dialog box that prompts you to find the .IQY file you downloaded from the
BigQuery Connector app. To see this file listed, you may have to change the
Enable selector from Text Files to Query Files. Select your
connector.iqy
file and click the Get Data button.
