Historical stock quote Price using Web Query and MS Excel 2003

“Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful”. That’s how the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett makes money. In the midst of economic crisis, most of you who maintain a portfolio or want to take advantage of the drop in points by buying stocks, there might be a question at the back of your mind: “What was the stock price of WXYZ on 25th October 2005?”. There are many websites which you can use to look up historical stock quotes. The best of all is the Yahoo!Finance historical stock quote search, found at their stock research center page.

I was wondering whether I can build this in Xcelsius. I was looking for an easy and quick solution. But I coudn’t find one. Well, if Xcelsius supported Excel Web Queries then it can definitely be done. However, unfortunately it does not. Hence I decided to build this using my first love, Microsoft Excel.

Usage: If you need to lookup quote price for a specific date, say June 2, 1997, enter June 1, 1997 as the start date, and June 3, 1997 as the end date. Then chose “Daily” prices. After clicking “Get Prices,” you should end up with opening, high, low and close, along with the adjusted close price for those dates.

Design: This model was built using Excel Web Query feature. Its very simple to use. All you need to find is a well organized website which displays data in tabular form. Yahoo Finance was perfect for this. I used simple components from the Form Toolbar. Radio buttons and the regular button components were used to build interactivity. Here is a complete article on “Pull data into Microsoft Excel with Web queries”.