I was talking with a workmate of mine and he mentioned that he is a swimming coach.
He told me that it’s difficult to record swimming times in Excel.
His approach was to record Minutes, Seconds and Splits (Split Seconds) as separate columns. Now, I can only imagine what sort of frustrating (if not impressive!) formulas this led to.
Over the course of this article, we’ve reviewed different mechanisms which allow ThinkOrSwim to communicate with Excel, written equations that use RTD, learned a bit about how to manipulate data with Excel, and uncovered a raft (maybe even a boatload) of live and streaming information we could be getting in Excel via ThinkOrSwim.
I explained to him that Excel can store Split Seconds right out of the box.
Just format the cell as mm:ss.00
Great! That’ll work.
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- Tell Excel Your Data Is Stock Data. You also have the option to manually tell Excel your cell data should be converted into the stock data type. Simply select the cells that contain the stock names/ticker symbols and navigate to the Data tab in the Excel Ribbon. Next click the Stocks button within the Data Types group.
- RTD is an Excel function that, for our purposes, opens up communications with ThinkOrSwim. RTD can act upon information sent between parenthesis in a particular order: 1. 'TOS.RTD' is sent as the 1st RTD parameter. It’s the quote-enclosed name of a ThinkOrSwim function that’s loaded into memory when you run ThinkOrSwim.
Being the thinker, he suddenly realised typing in the times would be even more difficult than before. It’s that fiddly colon key :
“Is there a way to type the times with a decimal point as a separator?” he asked.
Fair enough question. His times on paper are written as dot separated.
Fun! Let’s write a formula!
I figured out there were 3 formats of time:
23 which means 23 seconds
23.45 which means 23.45 seconds
1.23.45 which means 1 minute and 23.45 seconds
The hour portion of the time is never reached.
So for a time typed into A1, the following formula turns it into an Excel time.
=IF(LEN(A1) – LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1, “.”, “”)) = 2, TIMEVALUE(“00:” & SUBSTITUTE(A1, “.”, “:”, 1)), TIMEVALUE(“00:00:” & A1))
Again, the cell has a custom format of mm:ss.00
Excel Quotes Add-In
Excel Quotes Add-In has been broken recently due to changes in Microsoft's Quote Web Services. Please see this post for more information.
On 6/30/2019, I have revere-engineered the new Quote Web Services and updated my Excel Quotes Add-In with the changes. Please download the most recent version and copy over the previously saved QuotesAddIn.xll file on your computer.
A long time ago, my team at Microsoft built an Excel plug-in to get stock quotes from MSN Money. It looked something like this: MSNStockQuote('MSFT','Last').
Unfortunately Microsoft hasn't supported this plug-in for years :(
While building MSMoneyQuotes, I reconginzed Excel was still lacking a decent Add-In to get quotes. So I built one!
The Excel Add-In I developed uses Microsoft's own quote web services to retrieve quotes. Therefore it supports getting quotes for any securities that work on the MSN Money website and/or the Windows 10 Money app. I also added the ability to get cryptocurrency quotes using the CryptoCompare API.
I have made it freely available from my website. However, I do accept donations which help offset the many hours put towards building, improving and supporting this software.
Prerequisites
- Works with Desktop Excel 2010, 2013, 2016
- Supports 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Excel
- Built as an 'Excel Add-In', which is a special DLL with an XLL file extension
- Adds a new '=QUOTE()' function to make getting quotes easy
- Adds a new 'Quotes' tab to make finding and updating quotes easy
- Supports updating quotes for all securities supported by the MSN Money website
- Supports updating cryptocurrency quotes supported by the CryptoCompare API
Download and Install
- First determine which bit version of Excel you have installed using What version of Office am I using?
- Download the appropriate 32-bit version or 64-bit version of QuotesAddIn.xll and save on your computer (e.g. C:GaierSoftwareQuotesAddIn.xll)
- Add/Enable the Add-In in Excel using the 'Browse' option. Add or remove add-ins in Excel
- Click File/Options then click 'Go' next to Manage Excel Add-ins
- Click 'Browse...', navigate to the folder where you saved the QuotesAddIn.xll and select it
Dowload the 32 bit version - QuotesAddIn.xll
Dowload the 64 bit version - QuotesAddIn64.xll
Example Excel File
After you've downloaded and installed the Add-In, please see my sample Excel file to see how this works!
QuotesAddInExample.xlsx
Basic Usage
The Excel Quote Add-In works by providing a new Excel function (aka formula) called =QUOTE(). It can be used to retrieve quote data like last, open, day high/low, year high/low, etc.
The function accepts two parameters:
- Financial Instrument: This the special symbol MSN Money (and Morningstar) assigns to the security to uniquely identify it. Because MSN Money supports many international markets the symbol 'GOOG', for example, is not enough to uniquly identify Google. Instead, MSN Money uses the following Finanical Instrument to indentify Google: '126.1.GOOG.NAS'. Financial Instrument Search Page
- Quote Field: This indicates which quote field you'd like to retreive. See the 'Supported Quote Fields' for the complete list.
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Example Usage:
How to determine the appropriate 'Financial Instrument' symbol
I've build it a basic search pane that makes finding a MSN Money supported financial instrument easy. Go to the custom 'Quotes' tab and click the 'Search' button.
The 'Quotes' tab has a 'Search', 'Update Now' and 'Start Auto Update' buttons:
In the search pane, you can search by symbol or company name and hopefully find what you're looking for. Just start typing in the search field and the listbox will automatically load relevant results. This uses the same search service used by the MSN Money website, so I can't control the search behavior and/or results.
Once you find what you're looking for, you have the option to:
- Select the Quote Field you'd like to get a value for and click 'Insert Forumla' to insert the applicable =QUOTE() forumla
- Select 'Financial Instrument' to insert the raw financial instrument into the currently active call. This does not insert a formula. This may be useful if you're using the second approach [e.g. =QUOTE(A1, 'Last')] where you're referencing another cell to get the financial instrument.
Cryptocurrency Support
Excel Rtd Function Not Working
Cryptocurrencies are a hot topic recently, so I also added support for those. I leverage the CryptoCompare API to get quotes.
If you know the cryptocurrnecy pair, you can simply type the formula directly into the cell. For example: Or you can use the 'Cryptocurrency' tab in the search pane. Same as the other tab, start typing in the search field and relevant results will show up.
Supported Quote Fields
Here's a list of Quote Fields and which security types they're generally applicable to. Not all fields work for every security.| Quote Field | Indexes | Stocks | ETFs | Funds | Currency Rates | Cryptocurrencies |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Symbol | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Name | X | X | X | X | ||
| Currency | X | X | X | X | ||
| Last | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Change | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Date | X | X | X | X | X | |
| Type | X | X | ||||
| Exchange | X | X | X | |||
| Previous Close | X | X | X | |||
| Day High | X | X | X | X | ||
| Day Low | X | X | X | X | ||
| Open | X | X | X | X | ||
| PE | X | |||||
| EPS | X | |||||
| Volume | X | X | X | X | ||
| Avg Volume | X | X | X | |||
| Year High | X | X | X | X | ||
| Year High | X | X | X | X | ||
| Market Cap | X | X | ||||
| Ask | X | X | X | |||
| Beta | X | |||||
| Bid | X | X | X | |||
| Dividend Yield | X | X | ||||
| Industry | X |
How to update quotes
Once the cell(s) are setup with the proper =QUOTE() forumla, you can go to the custom 'Quotes' tab and click the 'Update Now' button. This button forces a 're-calculation' of all =QUOTE() forumulas, which invokes my add-in to retrieve quotes from the relevant web service APIs.
To automatically update quotes every 1 minute, click the 'Start Auto Update' button. Essentially this starts a timer to automatically run the 'Update Now' logic every minute.
Click 'Stop Auto Update' to stop the auto update timer.
Note: Quotes are cached for 30 seconds, so the if you try to click the 'Update Now' button more often than that nothing will happen.
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Help and Support
I've made this free to avoid creating a sense of obligation that I'll provide support. I don't guarentee it will work in every scenario or that I'll provide support when it doesn't work. With that said, if you do have a problem that you think I can help shoot me an email and I'll reply if I can.
Please recognized I am no longer a Microsoft employee and cannot fix quote issues on MSN Money. Nor can I address outages that the MSN Money quote web service may have. My Excel Quote Add-In is not responsible for the actual quote values returned by MSN Money, so please don't email asking me to fix such issues. Same with the cryptocurrency quotes from the CryptoCompare API.
I can be reached at my support email address: support@gaiersoftware.com
Release History
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- Version 1.0 - 01/31/2018 - Initial Release
- Version 1.1 - 02/22/2018 - Added Auto Quotes Update
- Version 1.2 - 06/30/2019 - Updated to consume the new Microsoft Quote Services