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Within a Google Docs spreadsheet, I need to access external data that requires basic authentication. Usually I would include external data by putting this in a cell:

=ImportHtml("http://somedomain.com/somepath", "table", 0)

For basic auth, I have tried a standard URL with credentials:

=ImportHtml("http://user:[email protected]/somepath", "table", 0)

Google responds with the following:

error: Data temporarily unavailable

Is there any way to use basic auth-protected resources in a Google spreadsheet?

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3 Answers 3

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ImportHTML does not support authentication. The data has to be publicly available for you to use this function.

This applies to ImportXML & ImportFeed also.

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You can use import.io. They have a feature called authenticated extractor. It creates an API from the page and provides you the code to ping it from the sheet.

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  • Could you point to documentation on this? I installed the import.io app, accessed an authenticated page, but I got the error "The API failed to publish." Either way it's not clear to me where the Google sheets code is provided.
    – glenviewjeff
    Commented Aug 2, 2015 at 2:14
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I'm looking for some solution here too. Have yet to investigate this enough but perhaps: https://developers.google.com/secure-data-connector/docs/1.3/tutorials/spreadsheets

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  • The secure data connector is only useful for documents you have behind a firewall. That won't get you around a normal HTTP request with basic auth.
    – Brad
    Commented Nov 5, 2013 at 1:05

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