Excel can be used to get inside historical data in order to dig out important averages, trends and totals. Many efforts have been placed to put real-time data in Excel to handle the quick collection of information. Integrating this data into Excel allows you to create a spreadsheet that contains up-to-date stock prices, currency exchange rates or sales figures.

Excel has features that are useful for real-time data which makes placing real-time data in Excel very beneficial to many establishments. Though many attempts failed to make this data compatible with past versions of Excel, there were manual attempts that allowed this data to be usable in other versions.

Excel’s Research task is the easiest way to get real-time data results. It is a new feature in Excel 2003 that enables every office application to draw in information from online dedicated services. Its setback is you won’t be supplied with data you want, since you are limited to few groups of free services or several groups of premium services that need subscription payments.

Web Query is another feature that enables Excel to pull out information from the Web. While the research task can only be used in Excel 2003, web queries started in Excel 2002. A web query functions by enabling you to get a hold of data from any web page table. An example is going directly to Yahoo financial to acquire stock quotes or going to related sites to acquire currency exchange rates. The setback on web queries is that they are inconvenient to configure as well as delicate. Meaning, even extremely small alterations in the source pages can entirely bewilder your query thus making it unfeasible to refresh your spreadsheet to acquire more fresh information.

An effective approach many are also taking is creating a spreadsheet that is supported by a dedicated web service. A web service is identified as a miniature program that you can contact in the web. The thing that makes it different is that the web service doesn’t perform on your computer but instead operates on a web server in a random place on the internet.

There are web services that offer software tools that empower Excel to perform real-time data exchange and sharing. They allow Excel users to publish and subscribe to data from internal sources, data vendors or the internet.

Unlike before when there are limitations in what you can do with real-time data in Excel, now there are tools that even allow you to incorporate third party or your personal real-time data feeds into Excel. Aside from the added data management, you can now share this data among different Excel users as well.