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How to Insert Refreshable Stock Quotes Into Excel
By JLP | November 15, 2006
Warning: this is a really long post!
There’s a cool little tool available for Microsoft Excel users that will allow them to insert refreshable stock quotes into their spreadsheets. Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to do it:
Before we start, you must have Excel 2003 as this feature is not available on older versions of Excel.
1. Download and install the Office 2003 Add-in: Stock Actions for the Research Task Pane.
2. Once the add-in is installed, open Excel and go open the Tools menu on the main menu bar and click on “Research.”
This will open a pane on the side of your spreadsheet that look like this:
3. Enter the ticker symbol of the stock you want to look up and then click on the down arrow beside the box that contains the words “All Reference Books” and scroll down and click on “MSN Money Stock Quotes” and hit the return key.
4. Now you should be looking at something like this:
5. Find the grey box that says “Insert Price” and click on the down arrow, scroll down and choose “Insert Refreshable Stock Data.”
NOTE: Make sure you have selected the cell where you want to insert the information.
6. Now your spreadsheet should look something like this:
CONGRATULATIONS! You have just inserted your first refreshable stock quote!
As you probably noticed, the quote isn’t in the most useable form. I usually title one of my worksheets “Downloads” and then reference that sheet when I need a refreshable quote. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me know and I’ll try to write up a tutorial on that too.
One last thing…
In order to easily update your refreshable stock quotes, you’ll want to make the “External Data” toolbar viewable. To do this simply go to the View menu and click on Tools and then select “External Data.”
It should insert a little toolbar that looks like this:
Then, whenever you want to refresh your quotes, you simply click on the icon with the red exclamation point in the External Data toolbar and your numbers should refresh!
There you have it. Now you know how to insert REFRESHABLE stock quotes into your very own Excel spreadsheets. Was this helpful?
Topics: Financial Math Basics, How to... |
