# Excel stock quotes/currency query turfed by Microsoft???



## joncnca (Jul 12, 2009)

In my Excel spreadsheet, I had some external connections to retrieve data for stock quotes and currency rates. I used the pre-loaded queries for MSN Money and Currency...but I haven't checked my spreadsheet in a couple of months and now it doesn't seem to work anymore...

I followed the MSN links, and it takes me to the MSN Money website...did Microsoft stop supporting their quote lookup query recently?? Anyone else lose this functionality, and what are you doing to replace it? (i.e. auto retrieve stock quotes and currency rates)


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## FrugalTrader (Oct 13, 2008)

You can try Google spreadsheets, they offer very similar functions to Excel for retrieving stock quotes and other data.


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## Xoron (Jun 22, 2010)

FrugalTrader said:


> You can try Google spreadsheets, they offer very similar functions to Excel for retrieving stock quotes and other data.


I've done this, but with varying degrees of success. Google often has problems retrieving even the most basic TSX data (like last price), throwing the whole sheet full of #N/A

Overall, I've not been happy with my transition to Google sheets.


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## webber22 (Mar 6, 2011)

I use Yahoo finance to download stock quotes. There are numerous examples out there for setting up the macro for excel or OpenOffice


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## Xoron (Jun 22, 2010)

webber22 said:


> I use Yahoo finance to download stock quotes. There are numerous examples out there for setting up the macro for excel or OpenOffice


I've started using Yahoo Data in Google Sheets (Take that Yahoo and Google)



> =ImportData("http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s="&B6&"&f="&$B$2&"")


Where B6 is the Stock Symbol
and
B2 is the Yahoo Data you want to get (I have Last Price, Name, Market Cap and P/E)


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## Retired Peasant (Apr 22, 2013)

From my web search, it's unclear whether they have stopped it completely or the service was just down for a few days.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/newmsn/forum/newmsn_browse-newmsn_watch/the-excel-quotes-service-is-currently-down-service/eeed2b26-1f85-46fb-9d7d-f90acb3dd1ea?page=5

You could switch to pulling data from elsewhere http://www.excelclout.com/stock-quotes-in-excel/


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## fatcat (Nov 11, 2009)

webber22 said:


> I use Yahoo finance to download stock quotes. There are numerous examples out there for setting up the macro for excel or OpenOffice


i use google sheets regularly and that hasn't been my experience ... sometimes you will get a hiccup but they always come through shortly and usually they work just fine

i have a nice workbook with several sheets for watching and dividend amounts, yield, projections and totals

google finance has a lot of data


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## joncnca (Jul 12, 2009)

thanks for all the suggestions, everyone. lots of people moved over to google finance, and while i generally love google apps for their portability and convenience, i don't like the need to be constantly connected to the internet. yes there are offline files, but it just isn't as powerful as excel either for all the graphs and everything i've generated. plus i'm just more familiar and comfortable with excel...that's how MS has us hooked. so for these reasons, i want to stick with excel.

i don't think it's just a temporary outage, also since it's been a few weeks (apparently) since it stopped working. some blogs say it's permanent..dunno how reliable their source is, but i can't wait around forever.

i found this add-in which on basic testing, seems to do everything i need:

http://www.savetodb.com/yahoo-finance-data-in-excel.htm

very flexible, it seems to be a built in VBA program (so i don't have to code or find the code myself), and you can just plug in the syntax into the formula bar and it'll run, just like a native excel formula. you can stick the formula into any cell, and perform whatever operations you want.


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## joncnca (Jul 12, 2009)

so i've played around with the excel addin that i suggested above... and i'm sorry to report that it's not working for my TD e-series funds. even though the ticker works on the yahoo finance website, it doesn't get updated in excel.

i thought i'd revisit google sheets, despite my concerns listed above, and give it a go. OMG. google is going to own the internet one day, if it doesn't already. this works SOOOO well and easily in google sheets, it's unbelievable.

for the time being, i've set up a sheet on google that will update, and i'll copy and past the latest prices into my spreadsheet (total only about 10 fund) in excel for the purposes of checking my asset allocation right now. i only rebalance a few times a year, so this is easy enough.

but over time i think i'm going to have to look into migrating this one spreadsheet for asset allocations over to google....damn you Microsoft. why remove such a useful feature..probably to peddle your clunky Bing app...I'm going to have to migrate all my software away from Microsoft...sad


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## avrex (Nov 14, 2010)

joncnca said:


> i found this add-in which on basic testing, seems to do everything i need:
> 
> http://www.savetodb.com/yahoo-finance-data-in-excel.htm





joncnca said:


> so i've played around with the excel addin that i suggested above... and i'm sorry to report that it's not working for my TD e-series funds. even though the ticker works on the yahoo finance website, it doesn't get updated in excel.


I had a problem, with respect to Option securities. A regular excel spreadsheet won't grab Yahoo Option data 
For example, "http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=AAPL160115C00080000&f=l1" will not work.

However, the savetodb tool that you mention above, does grab the data for Options. 

@joncnca, thanks for this suggestion. 
I might use it to track my Option investments.


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## joncnca (Jul 12, 2009)

i'm glad that's useful for you 

my portfolio us much simpler, but unfortunately it can't seem to grab data for TD e-series funds.

i noticed today that microsoft money is working again...sort of....only some ticker symbols work. i imagine this is perhaps because microsoft changed the syntax for entering ticker symbols...i don't understand why........and so i have some broken links.

i even tried to search the symbol on their website, to hopefully get the symbol that MS uses on their site...but nope, they decided that in favour of looking cool (i guess) they would omit the actual symbol that's useable in excel....

making me dislike MS more and more...i'm going to stick with google for the time being.


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