In this first part of the series of articles describing Excel Techniques for Personalized Backtesting and Stock Screening, I shall introduce the most important Excel function of all - the web query.

1. Let’s say I want to use the data from this webpage from MSN MoneyCentral, I would browse to this particular page in my Internet browser and copy the URL.

2. Open your Microsoft Excel. I am using Excel 2002 here, in case you are wondering From the menu bar, select “Data” -> “Import External Data” -> “New Web Query”.

3. Paste the URL in the Address text field and hit “Go”.

4. Click on a (and it will turn into ) to indicate the area you wish to import to Excel.

5. Next, click on the “Properties” button.

6. Select the “Overwrite existing cells with new data, clear unused cells” radio button.

7. After you clicked the “OK” button twice, you will see the following screen:

8. Give it some time and the MSN MoneyCentral web page will be imported into Excel. The best part is, the data we need are populated into cells within the Excel spreadsheet that allows us to manipulate them with ease.

This is just the beginning! Stay tuned for more exciting techniques to create Backtesting and stock screening Excel applications like these:

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