shakespeare might not see the humor in my twisting his ‘what’s in a name’ quote but rose smells aside, all names are not created equal...... its easy to relate dell, csco. ibm and such tickers to their company names..... others however can prove elusive..... that’s where having sym files created with the name included can be handy..... those steps are far far easier than they look… using eoddata’s symbol list pages creating sym files takes around 2 minutes per letter, start to finish..... so your lookin at about an hour for the whole nyse deal..... creating sym files in the <name>,<ticker> format avoids having name them one at a time..... remember in marilyns all pink and sparkly ‘mary kay’, we did both ways..... ‘mary kay’ with a name and the others without.... jon was concerned with eoddata, like with all data providers some of those symbols will not work with other data providers...... noticed some with the hyphens that quotecenter didn’t recognize..... that’s to be expected..... many sites will list components.... such pages can be used to create files with almost no typing involved..... just highlight , copy, and strip out the text.... if you use pages like cnets components, once those sym files are created you could use patrick’s dll to create a custom index of it..... just takes a second.... patrick did the hard part for us.... an absolute pure technical trader might feel the inclusion of a name would carry the risk of also including some sort of emotional bias..... to that i would agree...... however, everyone is not purely technical...... h