23/1/2021

to Excel Using VBA How to Import JSON to Excel Using VBA | Excelerator Solutions

Posted at 13:26h in Excel VBA by Ryan Clouse 

12 Comments 
10 Likes

Howdee! It’s becoming increasingly more common for data to be generated in a JSON
format as opposed to XML. XML was widely used for years, but recently JSON has
started to become the preferred method of data exchange. Many REST APIs have the
option to return both but the majority that I interact with default to returning JSON
formatted data. Therefore, as excel ninjas, it’s important to understand how to import
JSON to Excel for analysis. Before we begin on that route, let’s take a quick moment to
talk about what JSON is for those that aren’t familiar with it.

Curious how to do this in VSTO? Click Here!

What is JSON?
JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation and is a lightweight data-interchange format.
In layman’s terms, it is a string of text that represents a universal data structure. It is easy
for humans to read (when formatted properly) and, because of the universal structure, it
is very easy and fast for machines to parse and generate. It’s made simple because
JSON, at it’s most basic, is only two data types. It is made up of objects, or arrays, or a
combination of both. Objects are made up of key/value pairs (often called a dictionary)
and arrays are simply collections of values or objects separated by a comma.

It’s important to note that object/dictionary and array are the terminology applicable to
the .NET language. Other languages might have other terminology such as hash table
for object, or vector for an array. This site gives a great high level, cross-language
overview of JSON.

JSON Object
A JSON object always begins with { and ends with }. The key is separated from its value
with a colon (“:”). The key/value pairs will then be separated by commas all within the
curly brackets. In the image below, the rst key “color” corresponds to its value “red”,
while the second key “value” corresponds to the red hex code “#f00”. Hopefully you can
see why this might be called a dictionary as you look up the key (word to de ne) to get
its value (de nition of the word).

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JSON Array
A JSON array, in its simplest form, is a list of values separated by a comma that begins
with [ and ends with ]. In the below image, the JSON array is a list of string data points.
We can see that they are colors but there is no key in this example explicitly telling that
this string represents a color. Therefore, JSON is most commonly seen as a combination
of arrays and objects.

JSON Objects & Arrays Together

Most of the time, JSON is returned as an array of objects. If you recall, an object always
begins and ends with curly brackets. Therefore, the array of objects would have several
objects enclosed in curly brackets that are separated by commas and all objects are
enclosed in normal brackets (the array). That looks like this image:

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In this example, each object represents a color and its corresponding hex code. In Excel,
this would likely be two columns of data. One column for color, and the other for its hex
code value. Now that you’re more familiar with JSON data structure, let’s learn how to
import JSON to Excel!

Setup JSON to Excel

There are several libraries out there to help you import JSON to Excel. The most popular
of these is VBA-JSON which is available here on GitHub. This library will do most of the
hard work of parsing the JSON string to a dictionary for you and then you can write the
values to an excel worksheet. When you download the latest release, you’ll need to
import the “JsonConverter.bas” le to your VBA project. This GIF shows how that is
accomplished. You will also need to add a  reference to the “Microsoft Scripting Runtime”
by clicking tools from the ribbon, selecting references and checking the box for
Microsoft Scripting Runtime as shown in the screen grab.

Once you have completed both steps, insert a new module into your project and title it
whatever you like. To get started, we need to dimension some variables to use later.

Dim ws As Worksheet
Dim jsonText As String
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Dim jsonText As String
Dim jsonObject As Object
The ws variable will represent a worksheet in excel. In this example, we will use this
worksheet to both read in our JSON string from and write the parsed JSON to Excel. To
assign a worksheet to this variable, set it like this:

Set ws = Worksheets("JSON to Excel Example")

The jsonText variable will represent our string of valid JSON data. For this example, I’ve
pasted that string of colors and hex codes we looked at earlier into cell A1 on the JSON
to Excel Example tab. To assign that string to a variable, type this code:

jsonText = ws.Cells(1, 1)
This step is not necessary for the code to work for us. We could simply reference the cell
in the worksheet that contains the JSON. However, most of the time you’ll be returning
your JSON string from another data source, most likely a HTTP GET Web Call. If you’re
not familiar with HTTP Requests in VBA, click here to learn more.

Lastly, to put the JSON string into the jsonObject, we will use one of the methods
contained in the JsonConverter le you imported to begin this example. Since the builder
of this library made all of the subroutines public, it is callable from the module this code
is in. That call looks like this:

Set jsonObject = JsonConverter.ParseJson(jsonText)

This call instructs the JsonConverter module to parse the JSON string you’ve passed it
using the jsonText variable to a collection of dictionaries that we can now access. Now
that we’ve nished our setup, we can start learning to import JSON to Excel in the next
section.

Import JSON to Excel

The code to import JSON to Excel might sound daunting, but it is much easier than it
sounds. At a high level, all you have to do is loop through the jsonObject you’ve created,
and write each dictionary value to the sheet. The wonderful thing about dictionaries, is
this is easy to do with a for each loop. I’ve added a couple of variables and a for each
loop to our code and the result is this:

Sub JsonToExcelExample()
Dim jsonText As String
Dim jsonObject As Object, item As Object
Dim i As Long
Dim ws As Worksheet

Set ws = Worksheets("JSON to Excel Example")

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Set ws Worksheets( JSON to Excel Example )

jsonText = ws.Cells(1, 1)

Set jsonObject = JsonConverter.ParseJson(jsonText)

i = 3

ws.Cells(2, 1) = "Color"
ws.Cells(2, 2) = "Hex Code"

For Each item In jsonObject

ws.Cells(i, 1) = item("color")
ws.Cells(i, 2) = item("value")
i = i + 1
Next

End Sub
I set a counter variable, i, that I can use to tell the loop which row to write the data to.
Next, create my column headers for the data. Then, for each “item” in the jsonObject
write that dictionaries values to the cell row I indicate and increment my counter
variable. That’s it! The results of our import JSON to Excel code looks like this:

As you can see, we’ve turned that odd-looking string of text in cell A1 to an easy to
understand table of data with just a few lines of code!

Understanding JSON to Excel

(Advanced)
Now, I do want to point out that understanding the structure of the JSON you’ll be
parsing is very important. Within the for each loop, the code can access the value of
each object by referencing its key. This goes back to understanding the key/value pair
relationship of JSON and the dictionary structure to which it is parsed. The reason I stress
this so much is because, when you’re pulling back more complex looking JSON, you may
need to have multiple levels of dictionary references to access the value you want.
There may also be times when you have to nest for loops when you have an array of
objects with arrays of objects nested inside each object.
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j y j j

For example, let’s look at an example where the JSON is structured as a single object
with key “data” and the value is an array of data about employee’s and their organizations:

As you can see, we have an object with an array nested inside. Some objects in the array
contains other nested objects as well. This multi-tiered data structure is very common
when pulling data from a REST service and was very confusing to me when I rst began
trying to import JSON to Excel. Let’s examine what the code looks like for this scenario
before we dive any deeper.

Sub JsonToExcelAdvancedExample()
Dim jsonText As String
Dim jsonObject As Object, item As Object
Dim i As Long
Dim ws As Worksheet

Set ws = Worksheets("JSON to Excel Advanced Example")

jsonText = ws.Cells(1, 1)

Set jsonObject = JsonConverter.ParseJson(jsonText)

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i = 3

ws.Cells(2, 1) = "id"
ws.Cells(2, 2) = "Name"
ws.Cells(2, 3) = "Username"
ws.Cells(2, 4) = "Email"
ws.Cells(2, 5) = "Street Address"
ws.Cells(2, 6) = "Suite"
ws.Cells(2, 7) = "City"
ws.Cells(2, 8) = "Zipcode"
ws.Cells(2, 9) = "Phone"
ws.Cells(2, 10) = "Website"
ws.Cells(2, 11) = "Company"

For Each item In jsonObject("data")

ws.Cells(i, 1) = item("id")
ws.Cells(i, 2) = item("name")
ws.Cells(i, 3) = item("username")
ws.Cells(i, 4) = item("email")
ws.Cells(i, 5) = item("address")("street")
ws.Cells(i, 6) = item("address")("suite")
ws.Cells(i, 7) = item("address")("city")
ws.Cells(i, 8) = item("address")("zipcode")
ws.Cells(i, 9) = item("phone")
ws.Cells(i, 10) = item("website")
ws.Cells(i, 11) = item("company")("name")
i = i + 1
Next

End Sub
The code overall is the exact same, just referencing a di erent tab and added more
elds to pull out. The change I want to point out is to the for loop itself. The beginning of
the for loop now starts by referencing the overall object that contains the array. This is
referred to as the “root” of the JSON and you’ll see it if you’re querying a REST API for
JSON data. This moves the for each loop inside the “data” level of the JSON and will now
loop through all objects in the highest-level array. Had I left this out, the loop would only
occur once as the JSON is all contained within a single object at its top level.

The second piece I want to point out is the lines for address and company. These are
both objects contained within the parent object. So, in order for me to reach to value I
t Ih t f b th k t
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want, I have to reference both keys to get the speci c value I need. Lastly, I want to call
out that you do not need to write every value from the returned JSON to the sheet. I have
skipped over several elds to get the end result I desired and it does not a ect my code
results, which coincidently look like this:

I hope this brief explanation of how to import JSON to Excel was useful for you! Please
let me know if it was helpful or if you have any questions in the comments below. Also, if
you want to download the le with the example JSON and VBA code, you can do so here
if you’re a free subscriber to the site. It’s free, easy, and only takes a moment to sign up.

Cheers!

TAGS: excel, json, vba

12 COMMENTS

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BERTRAND CAMBORDE
Posted at 02:40h, 11 December Log in to Reply
Good morning. First thanks a lot for your post. I am trying the rst
example on excel for Mac and don’t succeed to get your code up
and running. First I had to import the Bas le manually because of
excel for mac 2016 not accepting the import of .bas le and I also
had to import a dictionary.cls class module manually since once
again there is no Microsoft Scrpting runtime reference on Mac. I
had to make changes to these codes since it was not working
properly (basically commenting out some parts) so not sure if my
issue is coming from there or somewhere else. I end up with an
execution error 438 on the rst loop of for each item in JsonObject
saying that this property or method is not supported for item I
guess. I have some print screens I can provide if necessary. If you
could help me there that would be great. I looked at the local
variables and don’t see where the issue is coming from. Thanks in
advance for your help

RYAN CLOUSE
Posted at 17:39h, 11 December Log in to Reply
Hi Bertrand, unfortunately the VBA-JSON library will
not work on a mac version of excel. If you need to
transform some JSON there are some links you can
google that will convert a JSON string to a CSV le for
you and you can then import that into your version of
Excel, but I do not believe you’ll be able to use the
methods I outline above on a mac.

PINGBACK:PARSE JSON USING VSTO FOR EXCEL | EXCELERATOR

SOLUTIONS
Posted at 04:35h, 17 January Log in to Reply
[…] Excel Ninjas! My article on using VBA to import JSON into Excel has been
one of my most popular. As a follow up to this I wanted to demonstrate how to
Parse JSON […]

MONCHAI PON
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Posted at 09:22h, 15 March Log in to Reply

i have data like this
” “quotes”:{
“2011-01-01”:{
“USDGBP”:0.642344,
“USDEUR”:0.747736,
“USDJPY”:81.112689,
“USDAUD”:0.980253,
“USDCAD”:0.997228,
“USDCHF”:0.933819,
“USDNZD”:1.284561,
“USDUSD”:1
},
“2011-01-02”:{
“USDGBP”:0.642344,
“USDEUR”:0.747736,
“USDJPY”:81.112689,
“USDAUD”:0.980253,
“USDCAD”:0.997228,
“USDCHF”:0.933819,
“USDNZD”:1.284561,
“USDUSD”:1
},
“2011-01-03”:{
“USDGBP”:0.645641,
“USDEUR”:0.748624,
“USDJPY”:81.574874,
“USDAUD”:0.98178,
“USDCAD”:0.991898,
“USDCHF”:0.933549,
“USDNZD”:1.289685,
“USDUSD”:1
}
}
}

how can i apply for it.

RYAN CLOUSE
Posted at 19:31h, 16 March Log in to Reply
Hi M
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Hi Monchai – can you post some sample code? You
should be able to follow along in the tutorial and
access your parsed json with keys like (“quotes”)(“2011-
01-03”) to access the last one. The string you posted
also is not formatted as correct JSON so perhaps that’s
the error?

TYLER ROSE
Posted at 06:39h, 16 March Log in to Reply
Quick question: I can access a nested key value pair with the
syntax of item(“address”)(“street”) as from your example, but I
need to get access with a variable and some values will be nested
and others aren’t. For example, I want to access it with a variable
like item(variable1) where I could de ne the “variable1” as “name”
or “address/street” and pull a value.Is this possible? I was able to
do something similar with an XML document, but JSON is giving
me trouble.

RYAN CLOUSE
Posted at 19:28h, 16 March Log in to Reply
Hi Tyler – you should be able to do this by just passing
in the variable that is representing your dictionary
key(s). What type of variable are you storing the
dictionary key as? You’ll probably need to make sure it
is of variant type. Do you have some sample code of
what you’ve tried to get working?

DEAN MILLER
Posted at 17:39h, 21 March Log in to Reply
Hi Ryan, I was hoping you could possibly help.

With the above example, what would be the correct method to

pull the “lat” and “lng” from the “geo” item?

I assume it would be the following:

ws.Cells(i, 1) = item(“address”)(“geo”)(“lat”)
ws.Cells(i, 2) = item(“address”)(“geo”)(“lng”)

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But I can’t seem to get this to work, any ideas?

Thanks,

RYAN CLOUSE
Posted at 17:48h, 21 March Log in to Reply
Hi Dean,

You assume correct. I just pulled down the test le and

tested and was able to successfully write the value to
excel – can you post your code and and error message
you are getting? That would help me understand why it
may not be working for you.

Cheers,
Ryan

DEAN MILLER
Posted at 09:23h, 22 March Log in to Reply
I’ve realised the data I’m using is slightly
di erent to your example.
Where you have the “lat” & “lng” as
additional items in your JSON, in the set I’m
working with, they are stored as a list,
encased is square brackets

“geo”: [{ “lat”: “-37.3159”, “lng”: “81.1496” }]

instead of “geo”: { “lat”: “-37.3159”, “lng”:
“81.1496” }

Is there a simpler way to extract these or

would that list need to be parsed again?

RYAN CLOUSE
Posted at 13:55h, 22 March Log in
to Reply
Ahh, yes when you have an array
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you’ll need to iterate it again. The

easiest way is probably to iterate
over the “geo” array. So if the
example I have above were an
array, when I reached the “geo”
array I would add another loop
like “For Each geo in
item(“address”)(“geo”)”. I could
then access the geo objects by
referencing geo(“lat”) and
geo(“lng”).

Alternatively (and I haven’t tested

this) you might be able to access
by referencing the array’s index.
So, you might be able to access it
by referencing item(“address”)
(“geo”)(0) for lat and
item(“address”)(“geo”)(1) for lng.

Let me know if either of those

solutions work for you.

Cheers!
Ryan

J MANNERS
Posted at 16:12h, 17 April Log in to Reply
I’m aware that this may be cutting in on these wonderful ideas,
however going on what Dean is talking about. I too had the same
problem with the JSON would start o as a new array.. To solve
my problem I did something like the below.
json parse would be;
{“jsonrpc”:”2.0″,”result”:[{“groupid”:”15″,”name”:”TEST
NAME”,”internal”:”0″,” ags”:”0″,”hosts”:
[{“hostid”:”10255″,”name”:”TESTING SERVER ONE”}]}],”id”:1}

The code I used that worked for me:

Using the advance code above as reference

Sub GetZabbix()
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Dim ws As Worksheet
Dim strJSON As String
Dim strResp As String
Dim jsonText As String
Dim httpReq As New WinHttpRequest
Dim strURL As String
Dim jsonObject As Object, item As Object
Dim i As Long
Dim a As Long ‘ ADDED THIS IN FOR IN LOOP
Dim grpHost As Object ‘ ADDED THIS IN FOR PARSING
RESULTS:HOSTS

Set ws = Worksheets(“API Group Host”)

strJSON = “{“”jsonrpc””: “”2.0″”,””method””:

“”hostgroup.get””,””params””:{“” lter””:
{“”groupid””:””15″”},””selectHosts””:[“”name””]},””id””:1,””auth””: “”KEY
FROM SERVER””}”
strURL = “URL ADDRESS TO THE API”

httpReq.Option(4) = 13056 ‘
httpReq.Open “POST”, strURL, False
httpReq.SetCredentials “YOUR USER ID”, “PASSWORD”, 0
httpReq.SetRequestHeader “Content-Type”, “application/json-rpc”
httpReq.SetRequestHeader “User-Agent”, “Mozilla/4.0
(compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”
httpReq.Send strJSON
strResp = httpReq.ResponseText
ws.Cells(20, 1) = strResp
‘jsonText = ws.Cells(20, 1)

Set jsonObject = JsonConverter.ParseJson(strResp)

i=2
a=4

ws.Cells(1, 1) = “Group ID”

ws.Cells(1, 2) = “Group Name”
ws.Cells(3, 1) = “Host ID”
ws.Cells(3, 2) = “Host Name”

For Each item In jsonObject(“result”)

ws Cells(i 1) = item(“groupid”)
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ws.Cells(i, 1) = item( groupid )
ws.Cells(i, 2) = item(“name”)
i=i+1
For Each grpHost In item(“hosts”)
ws.Cells(a, 1) = grpHost(“hostid”)
ws.Cells(a, 2) = grpHost(“name”)
a=a+1
Next
Next

Set httpReq = Nothing

End Sub

*************
Hope this helps someone out there..

cheers,
J

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