Over the past couple of days I've been looking for various tools that could help us extract stock markets data in excel. I've earlier talked about the MarketXLS excel add-in which is also a very powerful add-in.

Today I wanted to highlight the SMF Add-in which I came across just a few days back. I just don't know why I didn't know about it earlier. Again, a very powerful excel add-in. The SMF (Stock Market Functions) add-in adds a number of functions to EXCEL that can allow data to be extracted and/or retrieved from the web and placed directly into EXCEL cells or ranges. You can download and learn more about the add-in from their website SMF Add-in. Many thanks to the add-in writer Randy Harmelink who maintains the plugin.

Just to give you a brief, the add-in can be used to extract a variety of data from stock market websites. For example, the following function would return the Market Capitalization value from Yahoo's Market Statistics web page for ticker symbol "MMM"

\=RCHGetElementNumber("MMM", 941)

Similarly, the following would return the opening and last traded prices on ticker symbols "MMM" and "IBM":

\=RCHGetYahooQuotes("MMM,IBM","ol1")

There are also functions to return a range of options data items to worksheet cells, based on a list of special option ticker symbols and data codes. For example, this would return the bid and ask prices on the specified options contract:

\=smfGetOptionQuotes("SPY 12/19 2015 $190 Call","ba")

Go ahead and download the add-in to see how diverse it is and how it can quickly help you automate your financial models.