investing – Page 4 – HowtoExcel.net

Creating a Stock Screener in Excel

April 27, 2021

by howtoexcel with No Comment advanced functions investing stocks template vbafree

A stock screener allows you to filter through stocks that meet your investment criteria. It can help you find undervalued stocks and great dividend investments. But sometimes it can be cumbersome to always go back to a website and re-apply filters, even if you save them. In this post, I’ll go over how you can populate a list of stock data into Excel and then run your own filters on it, and thus, creating a screener you can easily access from within your own spreadsheet.

Step 1: Populating the list

The one thing you’ll want to do before you can create the screener in Excel is to download an array of stock data from a database. Personally, I like using Barchart because it has lots of useful information on there and you can get a wide range of data, and it is easily downloadable into an Excel format. It lets you do five free downloads each day and you can download 1,000 rows at a time. That’s thousands of stocks you can add. Using that in conjunction with the STOCKHISTORY function, and you can create a pretty versatile template. After all, since data like earnings, dividends, and other fields won’t often change, downloading a snapshot from Barchart once a month or even less frequently shouldn’t be a big issue. You can obviously use other databases but I’m going to use a free example for the purpose of this post.

On Barchart, I’ve customized the fields I want to use for my downloads, and this allows me to re-use them again and make subsequent downloads easier. To keep it simple, I am going to download just the top 1,000 North American stocks based on market cap. This is what my download looks like in Excel:

Now that the data is loaded, the next step is to create the layout.

Step 2: Organizing the stock screener and setting up the fields

I find it most convenient to always put any inputs on a spreadsheet on the top of the page, and the results below. This way, you can freeze panes to make it easy to scroll through all the rows while seeing your selections.

To start, I will create a field for each major field I have downloaded. After formatting some of my values, this is how my screener looks thus far:

Off to the right, I’ve added a date field because I am going to utilize Excel’s STOCKHISTORY function to pull in the price. This will allow me to calculate the current price to earnings ratio without having to download it from the screener as that multiple will change every day based on the stock’s price.

When downloading so many stock prices, it may take a while for the formulas to update. But once they are loaded, then I can calculate the P/E ratio by just taking the stock price and dividing it by the earnings per share.

Step 3: Creating the formulas to evaluate the criteria

The part that will take the most time is to now evaluate each of the criteria to determine if a stock meets all of it and whether it should be included in the results. Rather than trying to do this in one large formula, I’m going to break this up into one formula per field. I’m going to name these fields exactly the same so that it is easy to reference them.

For the first criteria, Market Cap, my formula looks as follows:

=IF(E2=””,TRUE,IF(D2=”>”,C9/1000000>E2,C9/1000000<E2))

D2 is where I have the dropdown for the > or < symbol and E2 is the value that I want to filter for market cap. C9 is the first row of data. My goal here is to evaluate to either a TRUE or FALSE value. I also divide the value in C9 by 1,000,000 just to make it easier to filter the market cap by millions.

For the % change calculations, I will do a similar calculation. Except this time I don’t need to divide by 1,000,000 and so it looks a lot simpler:

=IF(E3=””,TRUE,IF(D3=”>”,D9>E3,D9<E3))

D3 is my > or < dropdown while E3 is the percent change I am entering. Since I will enter a percentage here, I don’t need to make any special calculations. This is the same format that I will follow for the other fields.

Once I have set up all my calculations for the various criteria, I’m going to add one column that will check to see if the stock meets all of them. This is a simple formula where I can multiple all the values. A TRUE value will compute as 1 and a FALSE will be 0. And so even if there is one FALSE value, the entire result will return FALSE and not meet the criteria. The formula looks as follows:

=(T9*U9*V9*W9*X9*Y9*Z9*AA9*AB9*AC9*AD9*AE9*AF9*AG9)>0

Step 4: Converting it into a table

The final step is a simple one but it’s also important to make this sheet work smoothly. Select anywhere on the data set and on the Insert tab, click on Table. Hit OK and now you should see Excel’s default table applied to your data.

The reason for converting this into a table is that now we can apply slicers to it. And really, only one is needed here. If you go to the Table Design tab, there is a button to Insert Slicer. Click on it and select the one for the field that checks all the other criteria. In my example, it is called Criteria Met.

After hiding all the criteria fields, changing some of the formatting and adding the slicer, this is now how my screener looks like:

Stock screener after applying a table slicer to it.

The beauty of this stock screener is that by clicking on the TRUE button in the slicer, you are automatically refreshing the data in Excel and updating your filters based on the selections. All this is done without macros and it makes the screener easy to change with the press of a button.

You can download my completed template here. Please note that if you do not have STOCKHISTORY available on your version of Excel, some of the values will not populate.

If you liked this post on creating a stock screener in Excel, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.

How to Get Stock Quotes From Yahoo Finance Using Power Query

March 18, 2021

by howtoexcel with No Comment intermediate investing power query stocks tips & tricks

There are a few different ways you can pull stock prices into Excel. You can use the new STOCKHISTORY function, pull data from Google Sheets which has a native stock function, or you can also use Power Query. In this post, Power Query is what I am going to focus on and show you how you can pull data right from Yahoo Finance. Of course, if you don’t want to do it yourself, I also have a template that is ready to use and download (at the bottom of the page).

Creating the query

For this example, let’s pull Apple’s stock history for the past month. To do this, we can simply go to the Yahoo Finance page that shows the stock’s recent price history, located here and select any interval, whether it is five days, one month, or three, it doesn’t matter.

To get the complete data set, I’m going to copy the actual CSV download link from that page, not simply the URL. That way, it is possible to pull a much wider range than the default of 100 days.

I’m going to use that link to set up the query. To create it, go into the Data tab, select the From Web button next to Get Data:

On the next page, you’ll be given a place to enter a URL, and this is where I am going to enter the download link from Yahoo Finance:

Click on OK and Power Query will connect to the web page. Next, you will see a preview of the data and if it looks okay, you can just click on the Load button:

Then, the data will load into your spreadsheet and it should look something like this:

Stock price data downloaded into Excel from Yahoo Finance using Power Query.

If that’s all you need, you can stop here. The only downside is if you wanted to look at a different ticker or change the date range, you would need to get a new link, and update the query manually, which is not ideal at all. This can be automated and takes a little more effort but it can be done by adding some variables and making some tweaks to the query.

Setting up the variables

In Power Query, you can utilize named ranges. In this case, I’ll set them up for the ticker symbol, as well as the start and end dates. That way, I can pull up a stock’s history for a specific time frame. The three named ranges I’m going to create are called Ticker, StartDate, and EndDate which can be entered all in the same place:

For the dates to work on Yahoo Finance, they need to be converted to a timestamp. This is what that calculation looks like:

=(A1-DATE(1970,1,1))*60*60*24

Where A1 is the date. This is what the dates look like when converted into this format:

Those timestamps are needed for the Yahoo Finance URL to populate properly. These are the values that need to be tied to a named range.

Next, these ranges need to be coded into Power Query. To do this, click anywhere on the table that the query created, and you should now see a section for Query in the Ribbon and click on the Edit button:

That will launch the editor. From there, you will want to click on the Advanced Editor button:

Advanced editor in the power query menu.

Then, you’ll see how the query is coded:

You can see the source variable is where the URL goes. To insert a named range from the Excel document into this code, we need to use the following format:

VariableName = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name=”namedrange“]}[Content]{0}[Column1]

Creating the ticker variable will look as follows:

Ticker = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name=”TICKER”]}[Content]{0}[Column1]

To keep things simple, I kept the name of the variable the same as the named range within the Excel file. Here is what the editor looks like after adding in the variables for the ticker, start date, and end date:

Power query editor after adding variables.

The one thing that I still need to adjust is the source. This is a hardcoded URL and it needs to be more dynamic, utilizing the variables.

In this part, I’ll need to adjust the query carefully to ensure that it is generated correctly. I will put the ticker variable where the ticker should go, and put the start and end dates (in Unix format). This is an excerpt of how the updated source data looks like:

Note that for the start and end date named ranges, I included the = sign to ensure the variable is read as text.

Now that the source is changed, all you need to do is update the variables and click on the Refresh All button on the data tab, and the table will update based on what you have entered.

If you want to download my template, you can do so here.

If you liked this post on how to get stock quotes from Yahoo Finance using Power Query, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.

Average Down Calculator 2.0

March 15, 2021

by howtoexcel with No Comment investing stocks

Amount Invested		Shares Owned Today
Current Price		Desired Average Price

	Your Average Price
	Price Movement

Scenario 1: How much you need to invest to get down to your desired average price			Scenario 2: How low you can get your average (buying @ current price)
Price	Shares Needed	Investment Needed	New Average	Shares to Buy	Amount to Invest

Price to Earnings Ratio Calculator

December 5, 2020

by howtoexcel with No Comment calculator financial analysis investing

To enter data in the price to earnings ratio calculator, start from top to bottom. Tabbing over or hitting enter will update the calculations.

Current Stock Information

Price $

EPS $

P/E

What-if Analysis

Change

to

What P/E is and why it’s important for investors

The price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio is a key metric that many investors use when analyzing whether a stock is well-priced and a good buy, given its level of earnings. The calculation takes the current stock price and divides it by the company’s earnings per share, typically over the last four quarters. You can also calculate a forward P/E. This is what the ratio will be in the future, based on estimates of earnings.

This is a particularly useful calculation in a year like 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic has thrown many businesses out of whack and some are over or underperforming. And that means their P/E ratios may not be all that reliable right now.

Using a P/E ratio is particularly useful when comparing one stock against another. If a stock is trading at a very high P/E of 50 or more, it could be a sign that it’s overvalued. However, this can be skewed if a company is coming off a bad quarter where its profits were low. It’s always important to consider the context. And comparing different types of industries may not be helpful, either. A bank stock that is relatively stable and that may not achieve much growth will trade at a much lower P/E than a high-growth tech stock where its sales are climbing by 50% or more.

How to use this calculator

I wanted to create a calculator that could be useful for setting up alerts. For instance, if a stock is trading at a P/E of 50 and you want to set up an alert for when it falls to a lower multiple. You can use the What-if analysis section to plug in the P/E that you want to buy it at. It will then tell you the price it will have to fall to or the EPS that it will need to rise to.

You could also use it as a simple P/E calculator. While many financial websites may give you a P/E number they won’t always update quickly, like when a company reports its earnings. If you know what the new P/E is, you can plug it into the calculator. You can also do a what-if analysis to see what the ratio will be if earnings rises or falls to a certain number.

To enter data into this calculator, you’ll want to start from the top and work your way down. Enter the price and EPS first and then make your selections in the what-if analysis. If you go straight to the what-if analysis then the calculation won’t be correct. As you’re entering data and tabbing over, the formulas will automatically update. Hitting enter after entering in a number will also update the calculation.

Another calculator you may want to try is the average down calculator, which can help you determine how many more shares you’ll need to buy to get your average price down to a specified amount.

If you liked this post on the price to earnings ratio calculator, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.

Stock History Template

September 30, 2020

by howtoexcel with No Comment investing stocks template

Several weeks ago, I discovered that Excel had a new function called STOCKHISTORY. It’s able to pull stock prices and a great way to track stock prices and can help calculate returns. Excel does make it clear that it is not for trading purposes. However, it’s still a great way to stay on top of tracks and see how they’re performing. Below, I’ve created a template that will allow you to track stock prices and arrange them from best-to-worst.

Note that for this template to work, you need to have the STOCKHISTORY function on your computer, otherwise you’ll get nothing but errors. So your first step will be to check if it works on your file. Refer to the original post on the function as it will also explain how you can get it on your computer if you don’t already have it. If you’re running on old versions of Excel, you’re out of luck.

But for those that aren’t and that have access to the function, read on.

Using the template

You can download the template here.

There are three main inputs on this template:

Selecting the stocks you want to track.
Setting the date ranges you want to look at.
Entering the ranges that you want the macro to sort.

Let’s start with the first one, selecting stocks. I’ve already created three stock sections in this template, which you can of course change. Let’s look at one of them as an example:

The Start, End, and Return values are formulas. The only things you need to enter are the ticker symbols. Off to the left, shaded in light grey, I’ve also entered the code for the exchange. For the New York Stock Exchange, it’s XNYS, while the NASDAQ is XNAS. For a full list of the codes, refer to the original post on the STOCKHISTORY function. If it’s a popular stock that’s on one of the major exchanges, you may not need to enter it. I’ve included the exchange code for the sake of avoiding errors as it’s possible Excel might not know which ticker you’re looking for and select the wrong one.

You can extend the ranges to accommodate more tickers, you’ll just need to copy the formulas down in the Start, End, and Return sections.

Next: the date ranges.

Off to the right of the template, there’s a section where you can enter the start and end dates.

The template will adjust for weekends but not for holidays. If you see a #VALUE! error in the values, that likely means there’s an issue with the date, so you’ll just need to change one of the dates to ensure it doesn’t fall on a holiday.

Lastly: the ranges to sort.

To the right of the dates, there’s another area where you can enter which cells to sort:

Cells E8, K8, and Q8 on this template are where my ‘RETURN’ headers are located, and where the percentages are. If you add sections or modify this template, you’ll need to update the cells to sort. When you update the start or end dates, the template won’t automatically re-sort until you click on this button:

If you get an error on the re-sort button, make sure you check which cells are in the Cells to Sort area and ensure that they’re correct.

#CONNECT! errors

One thing you may run into on this template are #CONNECT errors. I’ve noticed this happens once you start adding too many ticker symbols. Sometimes it’s hit or miss and you’ll get all the prices updated, but if you’re planning to list every ticker out there, just be forewarned that you might run into issues here. It’s a separate error from the #VALUE! error and one that can’t be fixed through the template, without removing some ticker symbols, anyway.

If you liked this post on the StockHistory Template, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.

How to Use the New Stock History Function in Excel

August 22, 2020

by howtoexcel with No Comment functions investing stocks

For a while, one of the big advantages Google Sheets had over Excel was the ability to pull stock quotes easily. But that’s no longer the case as there is a new function in Excel that allows you to pull in stock price history. Below, I’ll cover how to use the StockHistory function.

How the function works

The function itself is fairly simple and requires just two arguments at a minimum, and that’s the stock ticker and the start date. By default, the function will return the closing prices from the start date until today. For instance, if I want to pull Tesla’s share price since the start of the year, this is what my formula will look like:

=STOCKHISTORY(“TSLA”,”2020-01-01″)

The formula will then generate an array. Here’s a portion of what it looks like:

Stockhistory function returning Tesla's share price since the start of the year.

If you want to pull just the most recent share price, here’s what you can do:

=STOCKHISTORY(“TSLA”,WORKDAY(TODAY(),-1))

Using the WORKDAY formula you can ensure that you’re going back one business day. You may need to adjust this if you’re on a weekend but basically you just need to manipulate the date to make this work. Note that this doesn’t appear to give you the current day’s close. When I ran this on a Friday, the most recent closing price it returned was from Thursday’s close. It’s clear this function’s intended for historical data rather than live or even delayed stock prices.

If you want to specify an end date for your data, you can enter a date in the third argument, right after the start date.

The function gives you many options, including which data points you want to pull in and what intervals you want. You can pull prices on a monthly or weekly basis by selecting either a 0 (daily), 1 (weekly), or 2 (monthly) for the interval argument. Here’s how I’d pull monthly prices for Tesla:

=STOCKHISTORY(“TSLA”,”2020-01-01″,,2)

Tesla's monthly share price since the start of the year.

It’s important to note that these aren’t monthly averages, they’re just the stock prices as of the end of the specified month. Although the date for the first entry suggests January 1 (the markets weren’t open that day), that’s actually the January 31 closing price.

You can choose whether you want to see the headers and you can also add more fields, including the opening price, the high, the low, and the volume. You can even determine if you want to even see the date (although that’s probably not a good idea when you’re looking at historical data).

It’s easy to make a template with this function since it populates the data for you. Using variables for the ticker, the start date, and the end date, I can quickly set up a sheet that’s easily updatable:

Excel template using the stockhistory function.

The only formula that I enter is the one cell for the STOCKHISTORY function:

=STOCKHISTORY(C2,C3,C4,0,1,0,1,2,3,4,5)

Where C2, C3, and C4 refer to the stock, start, and end dates. The numbers 1 through 5 are needed to ensure that all the fields are extracted.

If you want more details about this function including the different arguments, you can check out Microsoft’s official page for this function.

How can I get other (non-US) tickers?

One of the things you’ll notice from the above examples is that I didn’t enter any prefix for the stock ticker. The StockHistory function knew I was looking for Tesla’s stock price. However, if you want to pull data from other exchanges, including those outside the U.S. markets, you’ll need to add a prefix to make sure that you’re getting the right quote. And since the function won’t actually return the company name, you need to make sure you’re entering the ticker correctly into the function.

Refer to this link for all the different market identifiers. For instance, if I wanted to pull the share price of Air Canada, which trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange, I’d need to enter the ticker as follows:

XTSE:AC

In most cases, it looks as though it’s just an X before the exchange’s usual prefix but you’ll want to double check to make sure.

Why you may not find the StockHistory function on your version of Excel

Since the function’s in beta, StockHistory is not available for most users. You can, however, sign up for Microsoft’s Office Insider program which will give you access to functions while they’re in beta. To join the program, follow the steps outlined here.

If you liked this post on How to Use the New Stock History Function in Excel, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.

Average Down Calculator

April 26, 2020

by howtoexcel with No Comment calculator investing stocks

Scroll further down if you would like to see details as to how this calculator works and a description of it.

There is a new version of this calculator available here (mobile-friendly) that will make calculations at multiple price points at once (use the new interval field to specify how much in price you want to jump by). It will also let you know how low you can average down at the current share price.

Also, be sure to check out this free average down calculator template in Excel.

Average Down Calculator
Amount Invested
Shares Owned Today
Current Average Price
Current Share Price
Desired Average Price

The purpose of this calculator

If you invest in stocks and want to know how much it would cost you to average down, this calculator will help you do just that. Averaging down is a great way to take advantage of a stock that’s dipped in value and that you’re confident won’t stay there. By purchasing more shares of a stock at a lower price, you’re bringing down the average cost of your total investment. And that means you’ll need the stock to rise to a lower price than before to turn a profit. Or if you’re already in the black, then you can put yourself in a great position to increase those profits.

How the average down calculator works

To use this calculator, you’ll need to enter the total dollars that you’ve invested in a stock, how many shares of it you own, what the current price of the stock is today (or the price that you plan to buy it at), as well as what price you want to average down to. Then, click on the Calculate button. The calculator will then tell you how many shares you’ll need to buy and how much it will cost you in order for you to get to that average.

Note that since you can’t average down below what the current share price is, you’ll have to make sure that your desired average price is higher than where the stock is today. Here is the calculator:

If you liked this free average down calculator, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download.

Compounded Annual Growth Rate Calculator

February 19, 2020

by howtoexcel with No Comment calculator investing statistics stocks

If you don’t want to calculate compounded annual growth rate yourself, you can do it quickly and easily with this free calculator:

Calculating Compounded Annual Growth (CAGR)

Percent Change
Number of Years

[WP-Coder id="1"]

Do You Know Your TFSA Limit This Year? Track it with This Template

October 31, 2019

by howtoexcel with No Comment accounting investing template

A tax-free savings account (TFSA) is a very useful tool for Canadian investors to shield investment gains and dividend income from taxes. However, it can be challenging to keep track of the rules and just how much you’re able to contribute and what your TFSA limit is for the year. But that’s where this TFSA template will be able to help you.

What this template will help you do

The purpose of this template is to help you keep track of both the contributions you make to your TFSA as well as the withdrawals so that you know what your limit is in a given year. If you’ve got multiple TFSAs and they aren’t all at one financial institution, keeping track of all your transactions can be a challenge. That’s where a spreadsheet can come in very handy; having all your information all in one place can make it much easier to stay on top of your TFSAs.

By logging your transactions each time you make a withdrawal or contribution from one of your TFSAs, you can have a complete picture of your balance at any given time. There’s no limit to the number of transactions you can enter in the template, and this can be used for a running total — forever. And with no macros and a simple, easy-to-use interface, the goal of this template is to make the process as painless as possible.

Why it’s important to know your TFSA limit and track your balance

Probably the main reason that you’ll want to keep track of your TFSA balance is that if you end up overcontributing you can end up with a hefty penalty.

At 1% per month of the overcontributed balance in a given month, the penalty can grow very quickly depending on how much you’ve overcontributed by and for how long. The last thing you want to see is your TFSA incurring costs rather than growing your savings. It would be a bit counter-intuitive, to say the least. Any fees that are incurred in a TFSA are not tax-deductible and that’s why overcontributing to it is something you want to avoid.

One easy mistake that can cause problems for TFSA holders

While it may seem simple to track your balance, there’s one issue that can cause headaches for TFSA holders, and that’s when it comes to withdrawing funds. One of the advantages of a TFSA is that since the funds that are contributed are after-tax, you don’t incur any penalties for taking money out. Unlike with an RRSP, you don’t have to worry about a withholding tax. With a TFSA, you can freely move money in and out of your accounts as you need it.

The caveat, however, is that when you withdraw funds, the contribution room isn’t replenished until the beginning of the next calendar year. And so if your TFSA had been maxed out on July 1^st and you had withdrawn $10,000, then that will free up contribution room –- but it won’t be until January 1^st. Any withdrawals that are made, regardless of the time of the year, won’t free up space until the beginning of the next calendar year.

That’s where much of the complexity comes into play when it comes to TFSAs. While contributions will reduce your available contribution room immediately, withdrawals won’t make that room available until next year. That lag can create many problems for TFSA holders. That lag can give people the misleading impressing that they have contribution room since they recently took money out, and that’s where overcontributing can happen very easily.

Suppose your TFSA is maxed out (2019 cumulative balance is $63,500) and you pull all the funds out today and they re-contributed them immediately after. In this scenario, you’ve now overcontributed by the entire balance -– meaning you’ll get a 1% penalty on that entire amount, which would amount to $635. And that’s just for one month. Leave that overcontribution in your TFSA and those penalties will pile up quickly.

While that may not be a common scenario that will take place, it’s an extreme example that helps to demonstrate just how costly it can be to make a very simple mistake. That’s why simply tracking the balance and looking at contributions and withdrawals is not enough, TFSA holders need to factor in the lag that happens with withdrawals. It’s a small but important detail that can make a big difference in determining how much contribution room you have available.

Using the template to track your TFSA limit

The template itself is very simple to use and there’s only one area where you’ll need to enter data, and that’s in columns K:N. There, you’ll enter the date of your transaction, if it was a contribution or withdrawal, and the amount. The year field is the tax year and it will auto-populate once you enter the date. You can keep adding to the list of transactions as you need to and the table will continue expanding.

The one thing to remember is that withdrawals should be negative and contribution amounts will need to be positive.

Once you’ve entered your transactions, the summary in columns A:I will update on its own:

The one time you will need to update the above table is when there is a new year to be added. Since there’s no guarantee what a future year’s TFSA limit will be, you’ll need to manually add the year as well as the new contribution room. As you can see, in prior years, the TFSA contribution limits have fluctuated, normally ranging from $5,000 to $5,500, with 2015 being the exception with a limit of $10,000.

However, to add a year is as simple as entering the new information below the most recent line. The table will automatically expand and the formulas will auto-update as well. And then you’ll just need to enter the current year’s contribution limit (column B), and the cumulative limit will be calculated automatically.

Here’s a breakdown of all the columns in the template:

Column A: Year – manually entered.
Column B: Annual Limit – manually entered to reflect the current year’s contribution limit.
Column C: Cumulative limit – this is automatically calculated based on the data in column B.
Column D: Contributions – this is the total amount of the contributions made during the year, based on the transaction data.
Column E: Withdrawals – this is the total amount of the withdrawals made during the year, based on the transaction data.
Column F: Cumulative Contributions – this is the running total of all the contributions you have made over the years.
Column G: Prior-Year Withdrawals – these are the withdrawals that were made a year ago that will be added to the current year’s TFSA contribution room. For instance, you’ll notice that the transaction from earlier that was a withdrawal of $5,000 made during 2010 is not added back to the TFSA balance until 2011.
Column H: Cumulative Withdrawals Added Back – this is the running total of the amounts in column G.
Column I: Available Room – this is your available contribution room based on all the transactions that have been entered.

Going over your TFSA limit

If the available room, column I, goes negative and indicates that you have overcontributed to your TFSA, the amounts will be highlighted in red. That being said, just because it hasn’t highlighted in red doesn’t mean your safe and should use this as a guide and not an absolute indicator of whether you’re okay or not.

tfsa template contribution balance overcontribution penalty

There are many reasons why you could see differences from your own calculations versus how much room the CRA says you have. If, for instance, you’ve incurred gains or losses in your TFSA your contribution room will be affected. If you grew your TFSA to six figures or more and then went to withdraw those funds, then your contribution room would be replenished by your withdrawal amount, meaning you’d have a lot more room to use. On the flip side, if you’ve incurred losses, you can’t recoup that contribution room and are stuck waiting for the next year’s contribution limit.

Ultimately, your TFSA contribution room could look a lot different if you haven’t been eligible for TFSA since its inception, or if you’ve had gains or losses impact your available room. That’s why it’s important to take steps to ensure your information is up to date.

Planning makes perfect

Even if you haven’t made any transactions during the year, what you can do is to enter transactions you expect, or plan to make. Especially if you’re expecting to withdraw funds, you’ll want to budget for that in this template to ensure that it won’t cause a problem for you. Doing some planning beforehand can help prevent problems down the road, and save some costly surprises.

Checking your data

One of the most important things that you can do is to verify that your data is correct. Columns D & E in the template can be the most useful in this case because these amounts should reflect all the contributions and withdrawals that you made during the year. If you can’t reconcile to these numbers, then you know you’ve got a problem

Note that if you’ve made an error and overcontributed too much and then made a withdrawal to correct it, this template would still not reset the balance until the following year. In those cases, you may want to leave out the overcontributed amounts as well as the subsequent withdrawal to correct it.

When in doubt, your best bet is to confirm with the CRA. If you have My Account setup for access online, what you can do is access your balance as of the beginning of the year. While it won’t have all the contributions and withdrawals that you have made since the start of the year, you will have information on your available room as of January 1. This will at least give you a number that you can use as a starting point and then after factoring in your transactions, you can determine what your up-to-date balance is.

Downloading the file

As always, if you want to go ahead and try the file out just keep in mind there are no guarantees that come with it and that when in doubt, you should always verify your information with the CRA especially when it comes to determining how much room you still have available.

Here’s the link to download the TFSA template

The template will not factor in penalties and, ultimately, it’ll depend on how up to date your recordkeeping is.

The file is completely free of charge with no limitations. If you like it, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out many other templates that are available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.

How to Add Stock Quotes Into Your Excel Spreadsheet

June 26, 2019

by howtoexcel with No Comment intermediate investing stocks

Unfortunately, there’s no Excel formula that can add stock quotes for you. However, there is a workaround for that which can help you get what you’re after. In a previous post, I covered how to pull stock quotes using Google Sheets which is able to pull in prices and all sorts of other data. And in this post, I’ll show you how to get the data from Google Sheets into Excel.

In essence, Google Sheets is your data source or database, and you’re going to import that into Excel. It’s not specific to stock quotes, but it’s an example of how you can accomplish the same thing. So first up, you want to create your file in Google Sheets using that earlier post as a guide. Here’s an excerpt of what my file looks like in Google Sheets:

Once you’re ready, it’s time to link your Excel file to that Google Sheets file, and here’s how to do that:

How to Link Google Sheets to Excel

On the File menu, click on the button to Publish to the web

On the next screen, you should see something like this:

2. Select the tab that you want to export under the Link section and change Web page to Comma-separated values (.csv) and click on the Publish button, that will generate a URL:

3. Copy the URL that was generated in Step 2 and go back into Excel and under the Data tab click on the From Web button which is in the Get & Transform Data section

Paste it into the next screen’s URL field and click OK

On the next page you should see a preview of your data and if it looks okay then click on the Load button.

What you should see afterwards is what was on your Google Sheets tab from earlier:

And there you have it, your data from Google Sheets linked into Excel. If you make changes to your Google Sheets file, or if you want to refresh the stock quotes, right-click anywhere in the Excel sheet and select Refresh. Note that sometimes it may take some time before the file is updated on Google Sheets and before you’ll see any changes that you have made to the file.

It may not be an ideal solution if you’re looking to get stock quotes, but it gets the job done and avoids you having to try and find a complex formula or macro to pull the data that you want. You can use the Excel sheet with your Google Sheets data as a database and then lookup the stock prices from another sheet. The benefit of using Google Sheets is that you can have the best of both worlds – putting data online that you can easily update, and not be limited to Google Sheets and be able to edit and manipulate it as you need to in Excel.

Word of caution: if you delete or move around data in Google Sheets it could cause issues, especially if columns are missing and when you go to refresh it cannot find them anymore. If there is an error as a result of it or if you need to change the source, you’ll want to edit the query. When you click on the data in Excel you should see a section for Queries & Connections where you can edit the query. This is where you can select which data you want to include as well as change the source that you are pulling from. However, if it may be easier to just re-publish the data.

If you liked this post on How to Add Stock Quotes Into Your Excel Spreadsheet, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.