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Use your web browser to go to the web site:
finance.yahoo.com/
In the Yahoo finance web page enter the symbol for the equity instrument you want to retrieve
in the quote section. In our case we entered IBM and clicked on
the Get button.
After retrieving the quote, one of the choices offered was historical prices. We clicked on
this link and retrieved the default historical pricing information for IBM. This web page lets
you customize the start and end dates, as well as choosing a daily, weekly or monthly time period
for the historical data you want to retrieve. In our case we chose to retrieve historical
pricing information from December 31, 2001 until the most recent trading date.
Once you have retrieved the historical pricing information you requested, highlight and copy
the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) from the web browser address bar.
Open Excel. Select Import External Data from Excel’s Data
menu and choose New Web Query. This
action launches the Web Query wizard.
In the New Web Query Dialog box click in the address text box and press
Ctrl V to paste the
URL which you copied the from the address bar in your web browser and click on
Go. This action
brings you to Yahoo’s historical prices page.
Click on the arrow next to the table which contains the historical prices then click on the
Import button.
The next dialog lets you select the area on you worksheet where you want to place your
historical prices. Click OK to close the Web Query wizard and bring in the historical prices
into your worksheet.
Excel XP Simplifies Web Queries
In our example we used Excel XP to perform our web query. One of the improvements Microsoft
has made in this latest version of Excel has been with web queries. The most notable improvements:
- You can see the actual web page.
- You no longer need to guess or eliminate by trial and
error the number of the table on the web page which contains the data you want to retrieve.
With Excel XP you just need to click on the arrow next to the table which contains the data you want
to import. If you are using an earlier version of Excel check Willow Tips 2001-11
which shows you how to perform a web query in Excel 2000. If you are using Excel 2000 you will need
to enter 6 as the number of the table which contains the historical data.
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