How to Get Live Stock Prices in Excel - never build a stock tracker without this first

About this tutorial

How to Get Live Stock Prices in Excel is exactly what this live session walks you through, step by step, using MarketXLS so your spreadsheet refreshes with real-time quotes the moment the market moves. Whether you are managing a personal portfolio, running a watchlist for clients, or just tired of copying and pasting prices by hand, this demo shows you a faster and more reliable way to work. What you'll see: - A blank Excel workbook connected to MarketXLS in under two minutes, pulling a live bid, ask, and last-trade price for any ticker you type into a cell - The mxs_last() and mxs_change_percent() functions entered directly into cells, returning streaming prices without any manual refresh - A multi-ticker watchlist built with a simple column of symbols in column A and a row of MarketXLS functions across the top, so adding a new stock is as easy as typing one more ticker - Conditional formatting applied to the price-change column so green and red highlights update automatically as prices move during the session - A pre-market and after-hours data pull using the MarketXLS extended-hours function, showing how the same formula structure works outside regular trading hours - A quick comparison between Excel's native STOCKHISTORY function and MarketXLS live data, so you can see exactly where the built-in tool falls short for real-time use Why this matters: a spreadsheet that shows you yesterday's closing price is fine for some calculations, but if you are making buy, sell, or hold decisions during market hours you need numbers that move with the market. The difference between a stale price and a live price can be the difference between acting on accurate information and acting on information that is already several minutes old. By connecting Excel directly to a live data feed through MarketXLS, you eliminate the copy-paste loop and build a single source of truth that every other formula in your workbook can reference. This is the foundation that more advanced dashboards, screeners, and alert systems are built on, so getting this part right at the start saves a significant amount of rework later. This is also a common stumbling block: many investors spend time trying to make Excel's built-in data types or third-party API calls work, hit rate limits or stale-data problems, and assume live prices in Excel are just too complicated. This session shows that with MarketXLS the setup is genuinely straightforward, and the same formula pattern scales from a five-stock watchlist to a two-hundred-row portfolio tracker without any change in approach. Built live in Excel with MarketXLS real-time data during this broadcast. A link to the template shown in the demo is in the description below. Try MarketXLS free and follow along at marketxls.com.