What to use instead of Excel's Stocks data type and STOCKHISTORY

The product

Excel has two ways to bring a stock price into a cell, and Microsoft documents both on its support site, which is where every fact in this section was read on 8 October 2026.

The Stocks data type turns text into a linked record. Type a ticker, a company name or a fund name, choose Data, then Stocks, and the cell becomes a record you can pull fields out of — price, change, previous close, last trade time, exchange, a 52-week high — by column or by formula such as =A2.Price. Microsoft says it is "only available to Microsoft 365 accounts or those with a free Microsoft Account", and only with English, French, German, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese added as an editing language. STOCKHISTORY is a function: STOCKHISTORY(stock, start_date, [end_date], [interval], [headers], [property0]…) spills a table of date, close, open, high, low and volume at a daily, weekly or monthly interval. Its help page says it "requires a Microsoft 365 Personal, Microsoft 365 Family, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, or Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscription".

Behind both sits one supplier. Microsoft's page "About the Stocks financial data sources" says "Fundamental company data, historical data, real-time and delayed prices, fund summary and performance data are provided by LSEG Data & Analytics" — the company formerly called Refinitiv, whose 2019 copyright notice the page still carries. The same page fences the data on three sides:

• Delay by exchange. A table of 49 venues gives the minutes. Only Cboe BZX and Nasdaq's last-sale feed are real-time. NYSE, Nasdaq, NYSE Arca, OTC Markets, London, Xetra, Euronext, Hong Kong and Bombay are 15 minutes; Toronto, the ASX, Korea and Taiwan 20; Buenos Aires, Brazil, Shenzhen and Johannesburg 30; Warsaw and the Ukrainian exchange end of day. No Tokyo, Shanghai or Singapore venue is in the table at all.
• Who may use it. "The data is not for financial industry professional use or use by other professionals at non-financial firms (including government entities)" whose functions include trading, investing, compliance, risk management, treasury, financial research and a dozen more.
• What you may do with it. The disclaimer, in capitals, says any copying, republication or redistribution of Refinitiv content "is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Refinitiv", and that the content "is not intended for trading purposes".

STOCKHISTORY adds two limits of its own. It "generally only updates after a trading day completes", so today's bar is not there until the market closes. And "while some financial instruments may be available as Stocks data types, the historical information will not be available" — Microsoft's example is "most popular Index Funds including the S&P 500".

Refresh is manual for most people: Data, Refresh All, or a right-click on the cell. A setting that refreshes stock data every five minutes exists, and Microsoft says it is "currently only available to those in the Insiders program".

None of this is an event with a date, which is why the status on this page is restricted rather than retired. But it is a supplier relationship, and Microsoft has ended one before: it switched off Wolfram data types on 11 June 2023 with the sentence "We're simply choosing not to renew this partnership", and Money in Excel on 30 June 2023.

What to use instead

The list is ordered by how little has to change, because most readers have a workbook that already works and a limit it just ran into. The spreadsheets collection lists every card with an add-in; this page is about which limit each one removes.

If you want the same grid with different formulas, Wisesheets is the shortest move. WISEPRICE returns live and historical prices and WISE the statements and estimates the data type never had, and every function takes ranges, so a column of tickers is one formula. Pro is 60 dollars a year, individual use only. Note the catch it shares with STOCKHISTORY: on desktop Excel, custom functions need an Office 365 subscription too, and the vendor's advice without one is Excel on the web.

If the budget is zero, Alpha Vantage publishes a free Excel add-in in Microsoft's own store, on a free key. Twenty-five requests a day is the honest test: enough to keep a handful of closes current, not enough for a hundred rows recalculating.

If the exchange is the problem — Warsaw at end of day, or a venue missing from Microsoft's table — EODHD has an Excel add-on over 60-plus exchanges, Warsaw among them, with end-of-day for all of them from 19.99 a month. Check its exchange list for yours before paying. Twelve Data has an Excel add-in on a key that also serves scripts; its 29-dollar Grow plan is real-time for US stocks and end-of-day on the rest of its 27 markets.

If the licence is the problem, this is the hard row. Every cheap plan above is personal use. Tiingo ships no add-in, but its API answers in CSV, and Excel's own From Web query can load a CSV address into a table. Its Commercial plan, 50 dollars a month, licenses internal use inside one organisation for up to two developers — the cheapest published licence on this page that covers work, though for US and Chinese listings only.

If the name you keep meeting is MarketXLS, it is the same shape as the add-ins above at a higher price, with the data fees bundled in. It is a paid add-in of stock functions for Excel — on Windows, on Mac through its Office 365 add-in and in Excel Online, with a Google Sheets add-on beside it. Its pricing page, read on 9 October 2026, starts at Standard for 850 dollars a year billed annually, data and exchange fees included, for non-professional users; quotes come from QuoteMedia, 15 minutes delayed by default. Real-time streaming is the Advanced plan at 1,500 a year, and Business at 2,400 is the first plan offered to professional users. Default coverage is US and Canadian stocks, ETFs and options, with European and Asian end-of-day prices as an add-on, and the same page says the software is for personal use only as its licence agreement defines it. Against Wisesheets at 60 dollars a year, the question to price is whether the bundle — delayed quotes, a streaming tier, a support line — is worth roughly fourteen times the entry fee for the workbook you actually have.

If the workbook was a portfolio tracker in disguise, stop maintaining it. Portfolio Performance is free, keeps the file on your disk, prices US and European listings from its own feed, converts at ECB reference rates and exports CSV back to Excel when you want a pivot table.

For fundamentals rather than prices, the how-to on fundamentals in a spreadsheet covers that job in full.

What you give up

Real-time Nasdaq and Cboe trades inside a subscription you already pay for. The data type prices trades on Nasdaq and Cboe BZX without delay, at no charge beyond Microsoft 365 or a free account. The cheap tiers of the replacements are mostly delayed or end-of-day: EODHD's quote is 15–20 minutes on its end-of-day plans, and Alpha Vantage is 15-minute delayed at 49.99 a month, real-time from 99.99.

Typing a name instead of a ticker. The data type matches "Microsoft" or a fund name and offers a picker when it is unsure. Every add-in here wants a symbol in its own format, so the first hour of any migration is building that column.

No meter that we could find. None of Microsoft's pages we read sets a request quota on the data type or on STOCKHISTORY. Every pick here meters something — 25 requests a day on Alpha Vantage's free key, credits per minute on Twelve Data, 100,000 calls a day on EODHD's paid plans — and a workbook that recalculates on every edit spends a quota faster than a script does.

Migration notes

Paste the old history as values first, and set the date format. STOCKHISTORY output is a live spill: delete the formula and the numbers go with it. Microsoft's page adds that the function "does not stamp a format on the cells that it spills into" — paste as values and the dates arrive as serial numbers until you format the column.

Map exchanges once, by MIC. STOCKHISTORY takes an ISO market identifier code before the ticker, as in XNAS:MSFT, and Microsoft's exchange table lists the MIC for every venue. Wisesheets uses Yahoo-style suffixes such as SAP.DE and RY.TO; other providers have their own. A lookup column keyed on the MIC is cheaper than editing formulas — see symbology.

Check the period convention before comparing. For a monthly interval Microsoft dates each row on "the first day of the month, regardless of if it was a trading day", and a weekly row on the first trading day of the week. A provider that stamps the period's last day will look a row out of line with the old sheet when the data is the same.

Check adjustment on one split. Microsoft's page does not say whether STOCKHISTORY closes are adjusted for splits and dividends. Before trusting a rebuilt series, compare both sources across a split date you know — see why adjusted close differs.