Thread: Obtaining Stock Data to Chart in Excel 2007

Obtaining Stock Data to Chart in Excel 2007:-

There are plenty of free sources of historical data to chart. To obtain stock data to chart, go to finance in Yahoo or another of these sites and follow these steps:

1. If you don’t know the stock ticker symbols for the company of interest, use the Symbol Lookup link that appears next to the Go button in the top navigation bar of the page.

2. Enter a stock ticker symbol in the Get Quotes text box and press the Go button. Yahoo returns a table and a chart showing information about the current day.

3. Click Historical Prices in the left navigation bar. Enter a starting date and an ending date and choose whether you want the data summarized daily, weekly, or monthly. Click Get Prices to generate new results. Yahoo shows columns for date, open, high, low, close, volume, and adjusted close. A minor annoyance is that it shows about 50 dates on a page and then offers a Next link.

4. Instead of copying a page at a time, scroll down and choose the Download to Spreadsheet link that appears below the results.

5. In the File Download dialog that appears, click Save. An imaginative name of table.csv is proposed. Save using this name of something such as MSFTDaily2006.csv.

6. In Excel 2007, select Office icon, Open. In the Open dialog that appears, in the Files of Type drop-down, select Text Files (*.prn, *.txt, *.csv).

7. Browse to the downloaded .csv file and click Open. Excel opens the file. Column A, which contains dates, is typically too narrow, as shown in the Figure (given below). Double-click the border between the column A and B column headings to make column A wider.



(The .csv file opens in Excel, but you need to adjust the column widths.)


8. The data is always sorted with the most recent data first, so click a cell in column A and choose Data, AZ to sort the date into ascending sequence by column.

9. If you have more than one screen of data, from the View ribbon, choose Freeze Panes, Freeze Top Row to ensure that you can always see the headings at the top of the screen.

10. .csv files are not good places to store Excel charts. Before creating any charts, select Office icon, Save As. Choose to save as an Excel 2007 macro-enabled workbook.