Ms Office Tune Up

If you use Excel to track your investments, it can be handy to get the latest quotes for the stocks in your portfolio. Excel comes with a Financial Symbol smart tag that includes an option to insert a “refreshable” stock price for a given stock symbol. Here, “refreshable” means that Excel connects to the MSN Money Web site to gather the latest information about the stock symbol, and it then inserts that information into your worksheet. The stock symbol data includes active links to the Web site for viewing charts, news, and looking up other stock symbols

Before you learn how this works, you first need to ensure that smart tags are turned on in Excel. Follow these steps:

1. Choose Office, Excel Options to display the Excel Options dialog box.
2. Click Proofing.
3. Click AutoCorrect Options to open the AutoCorrect dialog box.
4. Click the Smart Tags tab.
5. Click to activate the Label Data With Smart Tags check box.
6. In the Recognizers list, make sure that the Financial Symbol check box is activated.
7. Click OK.
8. Click OK.

To try out the Financial Symbol smart tag, type a stock symbol into a cell using all upper­case letters and then press Enter. Excel adds a small triangle to the bottom-right corner of the cell. Hover the mouse pointer over the cell to display the smart tag and then click the smart tag. As you can see in Figure 1, the Smart Tag Actions list contains several commands related to the stock symbol. Click Insert Refreshable Stock Price to display the Insert Stock Price dialog box, which gives you two choices:

• On a New Sheet-Click this option to display the stock quote on a new worksheet that Excel automatically adds to the current workbook.
• Starting at Cell-Click this option to display the Stock Quote at the cell address you type in the text box.

Click OK. Excel then gathers the stock quote information from the MSN Money Web site and displays it in the location you specified, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 1 When you type a stock symbol, Excel displays a Financial Symbol smart tag that offers the actions shown here.

Figure 2 Click the Insert Refreshable Stock Price action to insert a stock quote from MSN Money.

Technorati Tags: live stock price quote, worksheet excel 2007

Popularity: 18% [?]

If you liked this post, would you please buy me a twelve-ounce lattes for only $2