Category Archives: Excel

Integrating Google Analytics into your Company Loop with a Microsoft Excel Add-on

 

Introduction

Google Analytics and AdWords are essential marketing and sales tools. They can be integrated with the ubiquitous Microsoft Excel with the Google Data API. Data Big Bang’s Nicolas Papagna has developed an Excel add-on which can be downloaded here. This plugin enables Excel users to quickly retrieve Google Analytics data using the available Google Analytics metrics, and dimensions, and may also be sorted by the user’s criteria. One of the advantages of our solution is that Excel accesses the Google Analytics API directly instead of accessing it thru Data Big Bang server. Other solutions need access to your information which this exposes your private data to third parties.

Installation and Usage

  1. Download GoogleAnalyticsToExcel.AddInSetup_1.0.20.0.exe.
  2. Install it.
  3. Run Microsoft Excel.
  4. Configure your Google credentials by clicking on “Settings” under the “Google Analytics to Excel Addin” ribbon tab.
  5. Customize your query and retrieve your Google Analytics data by clicking “Query Google Analytics” button.

Development Notes

Data Big Bang’s research team has also developed an OData web service that can be consumed using applications such as PowerPivot, Tableau and LINQPad. This web service doesn’t require any add-ons. However, since unfortunately neither PowerPivot nor Tableau offer query builders to interact with OData providers, users must know how to craft the OData URL query themselves. The most interesting part of this project was developing a Google Data Protocol to Open Data Protocol .NET class that offers an IQueryable interface to convert LINQ queries to GData. LINQ queries add a lot of expressive power beyond GData.

See Also

  1. Automated Discovery of Blog Feeds and Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Accounts Connected to Business Website
  2. Integrating Dropbox with Microsoft Outlook
  3. Exporting StackOverflow users blogs to Excel Hyperlinks

Exporting StackOverflow User Blogs to Excel

It’s more simple than what you think

Do you find yourself with the need to automatically convert URLs that you have imported in your cells to hyperlinks? If you search on Google there are many solutions but the top ones add complexity using macros or VBA solutions.

I needed to do it quickly in the context of retrieving information from the StackOverflow API. I was searching for all sites from users in a specific country to keep track of their blogs. So I added

SELECT
   Id,
   DisplayName,
   Reputation,
   WebsiteUrl
FROM
   Users
WHERE
   Location like '%Buenos Aires%' or Location like '%Argentina%'
ORDER BY
   Reputation DESC

on http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/110548/  and exported it to CSV but when they were imported to Microsoft Excel I needed to convert the URLs manually. The results are ordered by StackOverflow ranking.

I found this solution, you can just use the Microsoft Excel hyperlink function. Say you have URLs as plain text in the cell D2, then on column E2 add something like =hyperlink(D2) and this will do the trick. You can now click on all the cells!

Please don’t tell recruiters about this. Hopefully they don’t develop web mashups.

See Also

  1. Integrating Google Analytics into your Company Loop with a Microsoft Excel Add-on
  2. Automated Discovery of Blog Feeds and Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Accounts Connected to Business Website

Resources

  1. Most influential github users by location
  2. Implement OData API for StackOverflow
  3. Creative Commons Stack Overflow Data Dump