Get Stock Quotes in Excel

While trying to spell check one my sheets I have learned this cool trick to fetch real time stock quotes without any webqueries or vba or anything.

First enter the stock code in a cell (this works for US stocks only), for eg. AAPL for Apple, MSFT for Microsoft etc. Then ALT+CLICK on that cell, this will open “Research task pane” on the right side of the screen. The screen should look something like this:

Dont worry if you dont see the stock quote, that could be because your research type is set to either “all research books” or “thesaurus”, just click the drop-down and select “MSN Money Stock Quotes” – 2nd option from last (Excel remembers your selection, so next time you alt+click on a company code it automatically shows the stock quote) Once the quote is displayed in the research task pane, just click the “insert price” button to get the quote inserted in to your worksheet. Simple eh?

Now, if you want to track a bunch of company quotes, just create a simple macro to do the alt+click on each of the company code cells and you have a real time quote tracking terminal built into your excel sheet. Just go wild 😀

Bonus tip: If you want a company profile data for a particular stock (like company address, phone number, exchange codes, last year revenue) select the “Thomas Gale company profiles” instead.

Please note that both this options work Excel 2003 and above.

Also read: Create stock / mutual fund portfolio tracker in excel using web lookup queries