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SAFE TOOLBOXES^® simplifies the process of importing, tabulating and managing stock series. It provides a tool to fetch a bunch of time series directly from a provider, aligning and sorting them by date and displaying the time series in a meaningful table. It’s also possible to get real-time stock prices by a formula that periodically and automatically updates itself, delivering to you the latest traded price registered in the provider.

To illustrate the use of the tool, we will show how to get the adjusted closing price for the following stocks: Apple Inc, Microsoft Corporation, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Wells Fargo & Company and Johnson & Johnson. The first step to getting the prices is discovering series tickers in the provider and then type them in Excel. At the moment, Yahoo Finance is the only provider supported.

The next step is to click on the button “Historical quotes”, select the range containing the tickers and fill the other fields of the form as displayed in the following figure:

After confirming, a new tab with the time series will be added to the spreadsheet as shown below:

Fetching real time quotes is a procedure very similar to the one used to get the historical prices. For the same stocks, the real-time form can be filled as following:

And the resulting table will have a format like the one presented below. Please note that the cells B2:F2 will update their values at a regular interval.

Now a little secret: by using the same tool, it’s possible to get exchange rates using Yahoo Finance as the provider. For instance, to get the Euro/Dollar exchange rate, use the ticker “eurusd=X”.