Alternative to MSN Stock Quotes Add-in in Excel

This discussion happened with the intent to find the best Alternative to MSN Stock Quotes Add-in for excel.

Initial Email by Roger:

All of you that use this on a regular basis will already know that this quit working about 4 days ago.

I emailed Manish to ask if he knew if MSN was going to fix the problem since I wasn’t able to find anything about it through the searching I did. From what he had heard, MSN was probably not working on the problem and we should look for another solution. I was afraid that might be the case. Microsoft dropped the ball on their MS Money program that forced me to go to Quicken and I wondered how long it would take them to drop the stock-quote functionality as well.

I have already found a viable spreadsheet alternative with Google Docs and am presently building a spreadsheet with it that will duplicate what I had in MS Excel. I can share that here when I get it done. I should be able to do that soon.

Update:

There are two solutions that have emerged as an alternative to MSN Stock Quotes Add-in. 1) To use Google spread sheets which is great. 2) Use this new Stock Quotes in Excel Add-in which is also a great option.

Google Spreadsheet Option

I finished building my own personal spreadsheet with Google Docs as mentioned above.

Based on that format, I created a new spreadsheet with a mock portfolio and made it public. Here is a link to it:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xnr9vvyOojG7nYXRTnPPQuAuCO8Fijiew-5XyPrpKh0/edit?usp=sharing

If you are logged into your Google account, you can choose “make a copy” from the file menu. That will create your own version of it that you can change and enhance to suit your needs.

Updates from Marc Goldfarb

I received an email from a Marc Goldfarb with a solution to MSN Stock Quotes problem. The details are below:

I was also dramatically impacted by the 19-June-2013 change to the MSN Stock Quotes function for stock price download.

I had a hard look at it this evening and I have had success with the following change in syntax:

old syntax: