Did you know you can get stock market data in Excel? This has been a feature since Excel 2019, but you can now have that data refresh automatically versus the manual process that was required before. Here’s how you add stock data and how you can get it to refresh.

• First off, open up a spreadsheet and create cells that contain your ticker symbol, company name, or fund name into each cell. While it helps that you get them 100% accurate here, Excel does allow you to reassign later should it pick the wrong data feed:
  
• It’s not required, but recommended that you create a table with your data so you can add more columns with stock information. So highlight your new cells and select Insert > Table and set things up appropriately:
  
• Make sure your ticker symbols are still selected, and head to the Data tab and then click Stocks:
  
  
• You’ll now have a linked up stock table with the little stock icon:
  
• Now you can add columns of various data. Click on a stock name, and you’ll see the little add column button with various options of types of data you can add.
  
• Then you can build out whatever columns you want:
  

The problem with this (until recently) is that you had refresh this data manually. Now Excel will refresh this data automatically, up to as often as every 5 minutes.

If you want to go wild with stock data in Excel, you can start playing with the STOCKHISTORY function or write other formulas that reference stock data types.

If you’d like, feel free to download the template we used for this article here.

Disclaimer from Microsoft: Stock information is delayed, provided “as-is”, and is not for trading purposes or advice (if you’re looking for that advice, we have financial services firms as clients and can make some recommendations). Read more about Microsoft’s data sources here.