Pull Live Stock Prices Into Your Spreadsheet

Excel & Google Sheets

How it works

GOOGLEFINANCE is a Google Sheets function that pulls market data from Google Finance: the first argument is the exchange-prefixed ticker, the second the attribute — "price" for the latest quote (delayed up to 20 minutes), or "high", "low", "marketcap", "pe" and others. Add dates for history: =GOOGLEFINANCE("NASDAQ:AAPL","price",DATE(2026,1,1),DATE(2026,6,30),"DAILY") spills a two-column table of dates and closing prices, ready for charting. It also does currencies — =GOOGLEFINANCE("CURRENCY:USDEUR") returns the live exchange rate, handy for valuing foreign-currency invoices. Excel has no GOOGLEFINANCE; typing it returns #NAME?. The Excel equivalent is the Stocks data type: type the ticker in a cell, choose Data > Stocks, and pull fields like Price from the linked record — a data feature driven from the ribbon, not a formula you can copy.

"NASDAQ:AAPL"

Exchange and ticker, colon-separated. The prefix keeps ambiguous tickers from pulling the wrong listing.

"price"

Which attribute to fetch. Try "high", "low", "volume", "marketcap", or "pe" for others.

When to use it

Use it for a self-updating portfolio tracker, valuing company share holdings for a board pack, pulling exchange rates to convert foreign-currency invoices, or grabbing six months of price history to chart alongside your own sales data.

Common mistakes

• ✕Leaving off the exchange prefix.

  ✓"AAPL" alone often works, but ambiguous tickers can resolve to the wrong exchange's listing. Write "NASDAQ:AAPL" or "NYSE:DIS" to pin it down.

• ✕Treating the quote as real-time.

  ✓Prices can lag up to 20 minutes and are for reference only — fine for a tracker or report, not for timing trades.

• ✕Expecting it to work in Excel.

  ✓Excel returns #NAME? — GOOGLEFINANCE doesn't exist there. Use Excel's Stocks data type instead: type the ticker, select Data > Stocks, then insert the Price field from the linked record.

• ✕No room for the historical table.

  ✓The dated version spills a header row plus one row per trading day. If cells below are occupied you get a #REF! spill error — give it a clear area.