The easiest way to get stock quotes is in Office 365. But you also need the subscription model of the Office Suite for this. Although Office 365 offers the full potential, it usually causes annual costs depending on the model. It’s not worth it for everyone, which is why the stand-alone versions (most recently Office 2021) continue to sell well. The method below only works with Office 365. Unfortunately, the “Data types” option in the “Data” tab is not included in the individual versions.

To import stock prices into Office 365, proceed as follows:

• Open Excel in Office 365.
• Select the “Data” tab in the menu bar.
• Then “Get Data” and then “From Stock Quotes“.
• Enter the symbol of the stock you want to get the price for or use the search function.
• Select the data you want and click “OK“.
• Excel creates a data connection to the stock prices and updates the data automatically.

Using Power Query in Excel:

• Open Excel in Office 365.
• Select the “Data” tab in the menu bar.
• Then “Get Data” and then “From More Sources” > “Online Services” > “Stock Prices“.
• Enter the symbol of the stock or search by name.
• Configure the options you want, then click Load.
• Excel loads the data into a table, which you can then edit further with a pivot table, for example.

Both methods use external data connections from the web to retrieve stock prices and plot them in Excel. You can configure the update frequency of the data connection to update prices regularly.

The variant in Office 365 is the most convenient, but of course not the only one. So let’s look at the other ways we can get stock quotes imported into Excel.

• Go to “Add-Ins” in the Developer tab
• Then click “Store” in the next dialog window
• Either use the search function or go to the “Financial Management” category
• If you haven’t activated the developer tools yet, you can find a tutorial for it here >>>

Here you will find a whole range of providers who make it fairly easy to call up the share prices. But as always in life, nothing is really for free, because you usually have to register (free of charge) with the providers. So once again you pay with your data and not with hard cash.

see fig. (click to enlarge)

And since we can’t really do much with a static list, of course, we now make sure that you always have the most up-to-date data possible. In order to accomplish this, Excel once again offers a wide variety of options that you can use. Either go to the “Data” tab and then under “Refresh data” to “Query properties” or like me, where the table connections are currently displayed anyway, via the table’s context menu (right mouse button).

Here I recommend activating the check mark for “Update when opening the file“. Then you have the current stock prices at hand every time you open the file. Optionally, you can also specify a fixed update rate in minutes. For example, if it is an Excel file that runs in the background all day anyway.

Once the table has been sorted and the useless information has been removed, the whole thing can be easily inserted into Excel in a wide variety of applications. It could then look like this:

see fig. (click to enlarge)