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Excel Stock and Geography features reach 'Slow' Insiders

The truly interesting Excel live Stock price and Geography data feeds have reached the next release stage, ‘Monthly Channel (Targeted)’ better known as ‘Slow’ Insiders.

Stock and Geo data types are now in Excel 2016 for Windows, Office 365 subscribers who have chosen the ‘Monthly Channel (Targeted)’ Insiders release.  Version 1807 (Build 10325.20030) or later.

Stock Data Type lets you easily get the latest financial data for stocks and funds from many global markets.

No messing about with data feeds, web scraping etc.  Just enter the stock code and choose from around 30 different bits of information including latest price.

Real Time Excel

This update means more people can use the ‘Stock Data type’ section of our book Real Time Excel. That chapter (added before the public release of the feature) shows how to use the Stock Data type plus workarounds for problems and pitfalls.

There’s also an example worksheet you can open and use right away.  The worksheet includes code for some workarounds you’ll find helpful.

Geo Data Type

The Geo data type shows information about countries and cities.

As you can see, there’s still work to be done filling in obvious data errors and inconsistencies. At present, Paris was never founded and the founding values for London and Munich make no obvious sense. The Time Zone values are inconsistent and useless for calculations.

Except for truly lazy high-schoolers, you’d need to check any of the Geo results before using in any serious calculations.

The measurement unit for Area isn’t disclosed and the definition of ‘Area’ varies widely.  Excel appears to be using square kilometres.  The data appears to be grabbed from the first listed ‘Area’ on each Wikipedia page, resulting in ridiculously incomparable results.  New York‘s ‘1,213’ value is the total (land and water).  London‘s ‘1,572’ is ‘Greater London’ which is almost double ‘Metro London’ and less that ‘Urban London’.  Neither are a fair comparison with the smaller given Paris area ‘105.4’ which is the small official city area not the larger Urban or Metro areas.

 

Microsoft has an explanation page but it’s only an overview of the Stock and Data types with no mention of the problems or pitfalls in the service.

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