Excel VBA integration with RapidAPI - retrieving JSON data

Other Questions RapidAPI
1

I’m just starting with RapidAPI and need help figuring out how to get sports data (specifically football match results) into Excel using VBA. The issue is that Excel VBA isn’t one of the supported languages on their platform.

I’ve been thinking about whether there’s a way to see the JSON response directly in my web browser. That would really help me understand the data structure better. The RapidAPI docs mention that when your programming language isn’t supported, you can still use their REST endpoints, but I’m not sure how to implement this in VBA.

Here’s a sample code structure they showed for making requests:

var requestConfig = {
  method: 'GET',
  url: SERVICE_ENDPOINT,
  headers: { 
    'cache-control': 'no-cache',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'X-RapidAPI-Key': YOUR_API_KEY,
    'custom-header': 'custom-value'
  },
  params: { 
    queryParam: 'param-data' 
  }
};

makeRequest(requestConfig, function (err, resp, data) {
  if (err) throw new Error(err);
  console.log(data);
});

What I really need is either a way to view the JSON directly in a browser, or maybe some guidance on setting up a simple local server that could fetch the data and display it in a browser. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

2

Skip the VBA headache and local server setup - you’re overcomplicating this. I’ve built tons of API integrations, and manual coding always turns into a maintenance nightmare.

You need an automation platform that does the heavy lifting. I’ve done this exact thing - pulling sports data from APIs straight into spreadsheets.

Automation tools give you a visual interface to build workflows. Connect to any REST API (RapidAPI works great), transform the JSON data, and push it directly to Excel or Google Sheets.

No VBA. No servers. No JSON parsing mess.

I built something similar for our team that pulls API data hourly and updates our tracking sheets automatically. Runs completely in the background.

You can see the JSON response structure right in the platform while building, which fixes your browser viewing issue too.

Try Latenode - it’s perfect for API integrations like this. You’ll have football data flowing into Excel in about 10 minutes: https://latenode.com

3

Skip the address bar for JSON responses - use F12 developer tools instead. Hit the Network tab, then run a quick fetch() request from any HTML page’s console. You’ll see the complete request/response with all headers.

For VBA, parsing JSON is usually harder than making the actual request. VBA doesn’t parse JSON natively, so you’ll need Microsoft Scripting Runtime for dictionary objects or build your own parser. Sports data gets messy fast with all the nested team info, scores, and dates.

Honestly? Use Power Query if you just want regular data pulls. It’s way better with REST APIs and handles JSON parsing automatically. You can still trigger it with VBA later, but the data connection stays clean.

4

I’ve done RapidAPI with VBA before - it’s tricky but totally doable. You’ll want to use MSXML2.XMLHTTP for your HTTP requests. Make sure you get the headers right, especially X-RapidAPI-Key and X-RapidAPI-Host - mess those up and nothing works. Test everything in Postman or with curl first before touching VBA. I wasted hours debugging VBA code once when my API key was just set up wrong. Much easier to catch auth problems outside of VBA. One heads up - API calls are async by default, which gets weird in VBA. Set your requests to synchronous unless you really know what you’re doing with callbacks. Trust me, that rabbit hole gets messy fast.

5

you can see json responses directly in your browser, just paste the api endpoint url with params into the address bar - modern browsers format json nicely. for vba, use xmlhttprequest to make api calls. works great with rapidapi endpoints once you configure the headers.