Comments on: Creating Database Query Forms in Google Spreadsheets – Sort Of

By: Tony Hirst

Tony Hirst — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 17:38:43 +0000

Yes – for example, use the Google Visualiastion API chart components, eg http://blog.ouseful.info/2012/09/04/filtering-guardian-university-data-every-which-way-you-can/ or http://blog.ouseful.info/2012/04/05/scraperwiki-powered-openlearn-searches-learning-outcomes-and-glossary-items/

By: Doug

Doug — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 16:50:03 +0000

Looking for a simple way to create a form to search out and display various rows from a google spreadsheet based on two or 3 columns. Will this do it for me?

By: Tony Hirst

Tony Hirst — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 22:12:24 +0000

Yahoo pipes has a date user input block that accepts things like ‘now’, ‘yesterday’, ‘two days ago’ etc, and generates the appropriate universal time. The Date block can then format the time as required…

By: Deliman

Deliman — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 19:11:30 +0000

Hello,

I was wondering if you know of a way to query it by the current date. I can only query it by a single day using the decimal form or the date (for example, 12345 might represent 4/19/2010). I tried using TODAY in the URL but that didn’t take.

any help is appreicated.

thanks.

By: Ogunlola A

Ogunlola A — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 04:46:28 +0000

Tony,
Ooops! Sorry for not including this; can the search term be column header or the first code in the column which I use as the default.I use the url of my spreadsheet as source url in the ‘fetch csv’(http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Avz70mbKstyLdFpwTjN0YzVZYlZadk5GQldyazlSSWc&hl=en#gid=0). I want my pipe to display result in the six columns. Are these inputs right?
Awaiting your response

By: Ogunlola A

Ogunlola A — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 03:47:00 +0000

I created the Yahoo!pipes to query a dummy spreadsheet. The url base I use for the builder is http://spreadsheets.google.com/tq?tqx=out:csv&tq=select%20A%2CB%2CC%2CD%2CE%2CF%20 where%20A%20contains%20%22BA0000GH%22&key=0Avz70mbKstyLdFpwTjN0YzVZYlZadk5GQldyazlSSWc&hl=en#gid=0. My sheet have six columns A,B,C,D,E,F with the column header in row 1.I am confused with inputs in the following:
1.a.url on the “fetch csv”
b.use rows input
2.the query parameters on url builder especially the tq parameter.(tq gives a parameter different from “text[wired]“) The builder generates another parameter hl which is not in the example. Can I canceled it.
3. the strings on the string builder
4.Relevant inputs on text input
Finally how do I create a Yahoo pipes interface to query the spreadsheet and embed it on Google site.
Thanks for your response.

By: torkil

torkil — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:53:49 +0000

Just came across this and wanted to give some input:

=query(List!A2:A56,CONCATENATE(“select A where A contains’”,A1,”‘”))

can be written like this:

=query(List!A2:A56,”select A where A contains ‘”"”&A1&”"”‘”)

Bit weird to read with three doublequotes on each side, but at least you can drop the CONCAT.

You could also replace A1 with YourCustomScript() if you wanted to.

By: Mike M

Mike M — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:02:26 +0000

Got it — thanks Tony! I didn’t really understand where the concatenate command was supposed to fit in. As you may know, Excel has a “concatenate” command that is used to simply append multiple text strings to each other. So I thought your use of it had to do with the fact that you were grabbing multiple columns in your query, and/or maybe that you were allowing a text match to be found across any of those fields. Thanks so much for clarifying that.

By: Tony Hirst

Tony Hirst — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:22:49 +0000

Hi Mike,
When you generate the query string, you need to concatenate the separate elements of it; I used a constructor cell to do this but you can compound the queries as follows:
=query(List!A2:A56,CONCATENATE(“select A where A contains’”,A1,”‘”))
Okay?

By: Mike M

Mike M — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:50:43 +0000

Thanks so much for this great post! I am building a crowdsourcing project that requires each new database entry to be checked against the (rather large) existing data set to avoid duplicate entries. Your case study above seems to provide a perfect solution for this problem! Unfortunately I am running into a small problem making the autocomplete work off of an input cell as you described above.

I can use the query function to return a correct subset if I “hard code” the query parameter into the formula (eg, “Select A where A contains ‘San’”), but can’t make it work when I try to use a single input cell for my query parameter like you did above (eg, “Select A where A contains ‘”,A1,”‘”).

I get the following error:

error: Invalid query: Query parse error: Encountered ” “A “” at line 1, column 16. Was expecting one of: “(” … “(” …

I tried to copy your code exactly but I’m guessing there’s some small piece of syntax I’m still messing up. If it helps to see it for yourself, below is the link to the spreadsheet itself:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgABtvIwUWQudGxQR04yQXJjU2VZSVh2WTRLR1REN0E&hl=en

Thank you so much for any help you are willing to provide!