Lee J. Using Microsoft Excel 365, Stocks Data Type, Power Query, Pivot Charts, REST Web Services, And JSON To Web Scrape Market, Financial and Economic Data

Amazon Services LLC., 2020. — 285 p.It used to be very expensive in both time, money, and energy to get market, economic and financial data. People would get stock prices from CRSP tapes, read the paper version of the Wall Street Journal, buy the paper version of Value Line financial research. This all changed with the start of the Internet in the 1990s. The Internet removed the middlemen in delivering information and data to the user. Another big contributing factor in reducing the cost of getting data is with the evolution of Microsoft Excel embracing the Internet. Usually, users use web browsers like Microsoft Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome to access the internet. Excel and other applications can now also access the web.One big overarching theme of the Internet is “FREE.” With web browsers and Microsoft Excel 365, we can quickly and often at no cost promptly get data to get an excellent general understanding of the current economic, financial, and market conditions. If we want a deeper sense of economic and market conditions, we can pay for more valuable data for a reasonable fee. Go to https://www.office.com/ to buy a subscription of Excel 365.In Excel 365, we will use the Stocks Data Type and Power Query’s features to retrieve data from the internet. We will also use Power Query’s capability to consume REST web services and Power Query’s ability to format JSON data. The Stocks Data Type feature is only available in Excel 365.We will see that Microsoft Excel 365 will significantly reduce the time to gather and process market and economic data and give us more time to analyze and understand the market, economic and financial data.