Neat Google Spreadsheet Tricks

I recently read an article about the ever improving Google Apps and how Google has incorporated search functions into their spreadsheet application.

Avid spreadsheet users have known for years how to use a spreadsheet to track, sort, and analyze numerous types of data but never before has a spreadsheet been tweaked to allow for instant answers to queries submitted to the internet.

Say for example that you are interested in tracking the price of your favorite stock you can enter the following in the formula bar:  =GoogleFinance("GOOG", "Price") and when you hit enter the spreadsheet will perform a search of the Google Finance website and return the price of the stock. 

My suggestion is to label your spreadsheet as follows to track the following five stocks:

Cell A1:  Google
Cell A2:  =GoogleFinance("GOOG", "Price")
Cell B1:  Microsoft
Cell B2:  =GoogleFinance("MSFT", "Price")
Cell C1:  Cisco
Cell C2:  =GoogleFinance("CSCO", "Price")
Cell D1:  VMware Inc
Cell D2:  =GoogleFinance("VMW", "Price")
Cell E1:  Oracle
Cell E2:  =GoogleFinance("ORCL", "Price")

All of these stocks are leaders in the technology sector and I would recommend owning any of them in a long term stock portfolio.  If you are wary of buying individual stocks I would recommend buying shares of the iShares Dow Jones US Technology ETF which has a stock ticker of IYW which would can be tracked in cell F as:

Cell F1:  iShares Dow Jones US Technology ETF
Cell F2:  =GoogleFinance("IYW", "Price")

This spreadsheet will update itself when you open it as it performs a query against the Google Finance website.  If you want to track the history of a stock price then you can manually enter the price in the cell underneath (example would be to put $596.27 in Cell A3.  Now if you do that you would need to enter a date, in which case I would insert a new column to the left of A making it the date column which could then be used as your temporal tracker.  I will write later on how to capture this data to plot the historical price of your stocks.

If you have any questions feel free to post a comment, and if you don't have a gmail account yet, what are you waiting for?