Hey lfe885-

Welcome to the forum!

Perhaps the easiest way would be to create an Excel exploration... search, sort, custom formula fields, etc. and a DDE interface should get you started. Especially if you already have all of your symbols set up. You should be able to do this without any problems.

Well... set up an Excel spreadsheet with the criteria that you are interested in exploring. For example: close, MovAvg, etc. Then you can create a link to the MetaStock data feed and allow it to update your worksheet. Once you have the data captured in your Excel worksheet, sort it (explore it) as you see fit using Excel's commands. You can run statistical commands etc. on the data. You don't really need MetaStock to do that if your whole objective is to get the data back into Excel anyway. Check out DDE and OLE in the User's Manual. That'll give you an idea of where to begin.

Yep, I actually use it every day. What data provider are you using?

Hey DieselPR-

Look at these generic directions. They should be pretty close. Once you have your DDE link working, you will have a functioning array pasted into your Excel worksheet. Since you can't change the elements of an array, you can hide the distracting information by selecting FORMAT | COLUMN | HIDE. For example, if you only wanted to see the close then you could hide the other data. An alternative would be to reference the CLOSE column in a different worksheet of the same workbook.

Getting started quickly (referenced from the MetaStock Help file):
1. Open Excel and clear the Office Clipboard: EDIT | OFFICE CLIPBOARD | CLEAR ALL
1. Open MetaStock and display the desired chart (SmartCharts or Charts are OK)
2. Right-click on the price plot or indicator plot and choose COPY from the shortcut menu
4. Change back to Excel, then position the cursor at the desired location within the spreadsheet
5. Right-click on the cell and choose PASTE SPECIAL from the shortcut menu
6. Choose the PASTE LINK radio button; CSV ("comma separated values") as the file type; Click OK.
7. Repeat as desired for further indicators; Right-click on subsequest date/time columns and select HIDE
8. You don't have to have all the applications open in order for the OLE links to remain up-to-date

Notes:
1. Format your Excel worksheet:
e.g., DATE for first column of data, TIME for second column of data, NUMBER for remaining columns of data
Indicator format requires 3 columns: Date, Time, Indicator Value
Price plot format requires 8 columns: Date, Time, Open, High, Low, Close, Volume, OI
2. Ensure that your data area has room to expand as data is updated
The required data range will depend on the number of data periods loaded by MetaStock
3. Use WINDOW | FREEZE PANE to facilitate readibility
4. Data link will automatically update unless you set it to update manually: EDIT | LINKS | UPDATE MANUAL



HTH,

George

I have never had any success with the update feature when creating OLE links of MetaStock price data in Excel spreadsheets. Neither automatic nor manual updating results in new data being appended to the spreadsheet.

Any suggestions about how to identify what may be going wrong here?

Thanks...

P.S. I'm using EOD version 9.0.

g_stockman,

Thanks for your comments.

Yes, I do have excel setup for automatic calculations. I tried using your VBA macro with no result. And I also attempted to download the OLE example from this forum but it was shown as containing 0 bytes and WindowsXP was unable to recognize the file format - neither pdf, doc nor notepad formats produced any text!

Another curious clue: When I first open the excel file onto which I pasted the MS data (yes, using paste special, link, cvs, etc..), a popup window appears with the message "The workbook you opened contains automatic links to information in another workbook. Do you want to update this workbook with changes made to the other workbook?" with YES and NO choices. If I select the YES option, then the MetaStock application launches and displays an empty chart window that should be occupied by a chart of QQQQ! All the fields in the corresponding excel workbook then display "#N/A". This makes me wonder if there is some MS setting that is amiss here.

All suggestions welcome!

OK. With MetaStock running, connected to the data source (Reuters), smartchart loaded and MS minimized, upon running Excel, opening the desired file and answering YES, something does appear to happen. But not what I expect. The data are not updated beyond the date on which they were originally copied and pasted into the spreadsheet (about 2 weeks ago in this instance). Data (EOD in this case) for more recent dates are NOT appended.

This is another clue but I don't know what to make of it...

The chart does show current data – it just doesn’t show up in the Excel spreadsheet. I don’t see any refresh button; maybe MS EOD doesn’t have one. The help menu contains no reference to one on the index page.

I can’t use your Intel sample because it refers to a specific file location on your computer with the following path:

C:\\Documents and Settings\\Daddy\\Local Settings\ emp\\mwl1E8.tmp'!'\\Intel Corp

I would have to recreate that path and copy the MS file for INTC there. Without doing that, responding with YES to Excel’s update query results in the contents of all cells being converted from numbers to #NAME? .

As it is, I have created three new spreadsheets and established links in them to three different MS files that reside in a directory that I use on my machine. Of course, the data shown in all three spreadsheets is current as of last Friday’s trading. I expect that the problem will again be with the update, as it always has been. (The last time I had experimented with OLE links was last February. That spreadsheet won’t update, either.) I'll post a message after I download tomorrow's EOD data and attempt to update those spreadsheets.

Stay tuned...

As I expected, the Excel spreadsheets failed to update with today's EOD data -- in triplicate (I had set up three different stocks for this test).

It seems to me that there is something fundamentally (please excuse the term) wrong here. This feature has never worked for me. Not over a period of several years. Not on any of four different PCs and a couple of different operating systems. I am most curious as to what might be the cause.

Here's one thought. I store all my data locally. And I only use EOD data, not intraday. I also don't use MS's DataOnDemand feature. That is probably the reason why the "refresh" button has never worked (and why I had forgotten about it). In fact, I attempted to refresh a couple of charts prior to performing a Downloader download and nothing happened -- i.e., the chart was not updated to include today's data. But the newly downloaded data now appears on the charts -- yet it did not appear in the spreadsheets. Perhaps this feature only works for MSPro with DoD???

Any further suggestions will be most welcome...

Yes, that's the way I always do it. Yet, the Excel spreadsheets never update to show new data...