This week (June 18 2013), I suddenly found that the MSNStockQuote add-in for Excel stopped working, putting a "#VALUE" in every cell where the stock price used to appear.  Am I the only one experiencing this?  Does anyone know how to fix it?

MSN recently, this week, redesigned their new finance website and that may have broken how the quotes/information were retrieved. A piece of software I use was affected and the developer sent this note:

"MSN rolled out a new version of their website yesterday (http://money.msn.com/common/now-on-msn-money-new-quote-data-pages), now supporting data from Morningstar. This has not impacted historic data, but has broken the interface for day data."

HTH

For US stocks if you replace "US" in the equation - MSNStockQuote("IBM","Last Price","UK") - with anything else it seems to work.

UK stocks still work

JohnDoe1500,

Thanks for that quick fix. Worked for all but a handful of stock quotes. Do you have any idea about options quotes? That seems to be totally broken and replacing "US" in the equation has no effect.

Thanks for you assistance.

Option symbols have to be in the same format as they are in MSN Money.  Go to that site and 

request the option chain for a specific underlying symbol. As far as I can tell the format is unique to MSN Money. 

All in all this change has been a real nuisance. 

dp571,

Yes, I know that the option symbols have to be in a specific format, but the format that MSN Money had been using was changed when they updated the site, so the symbols that I had been using successfully for a couple of years to bring the option quotes into my Excel spreadsheet with the stock quote add-in now don't work.

After some noodling, I think that I have parsed the new code, which is as follows:

126.2.{Stock symbol}{Last digit of year}{Month code}{Day code}C{6 place Strike price with three places before and three places after assumed decimal point}

Thus the new MSN option symbol for the American Express $62.5 calls expiring on July 20, 2013 is:

126.2.AXP3GKC062500 (it seems that it has to be all capital letters to work with the add-in)

The month codes are the same ones used previously for calls and puts, to wit,

Month     Call   Put

January     A      M

February   B      N

March       C      O

etc.

The new date code appears to start with A=10, B=11, etc, so in the example given the code for the July 20 expiration date is GK followed by "C" which appears to be a constant as it is in both call and put symbols and for all dates.

Now I have to rebuild my Excel spreadsheet to incorporate concatenation of these new symbol strings and see if it actually works.

HTH

I figured out and agree with everything that is said above except two questions:

1) I still don't get how you come to [K] for [20] th of July and

2) I am aware that there is a maximum number of returns but I have a giant spreadsheet which gave me well over 100 returns before, now it seems it completely chokes up because of its size and gives me nothing. I don't want to split the spreadsheet into smaller segments because that would defeat a sort purpose. I wouldn't mind paying for additional returns. Is there a way? And anyway, what is the maximum?

Thanks, Dick Kaufmann

Forget the question about the 20th of July I figured it out

Dick,

My experience since applying JohnDoe1500's fix has been that the formula will work in a spreadsheet, but is very erratic when updating a series of quotes at one time. For example, I have a spreadsheet with approximately 100 options for which I want quotes. The "US" region code no longer works at all. If I substitute "UK" for "US" as JohnDoe1500 suggested, I may get 2/3 of the quotes when I run the "update quotes" macro. What I have found is that if, after running the macro, I then substitute "XX" for "UK" as the region code in all of the cells, ALL of the quotes will now be returned. The following day, now with "XX" as the region code, something less than all of the quotes will show after a bulk update. Now, substituting "UK" for "XX" after running the macro will again return all of the quotes. I know it makes absolutely no sense, but it works and without having access to the update macro code, there is not much else one can do but experiment. This evening, after the market closes, I am going to try a blank, i.e., "" region code and see if that works more consistently.

As far as I know, there is no limit to the number of quotes that can be requested when running the macro. The same problem that I described in the previous paragraph occurs on spreadsheets of only a couple of dozen stock quotes.

HTH.

For US stocks if you replace "US" in the equation with "USA" all functionality was restored - MSNStockQuote("IBM","Last Price","USA")

Hooray for you RDDXX, I hunted all over the net when MS stock quotes stopped working.  You fixed the problem.  I would mention that I used "replace" to change all "US" to "USA" and they are all working. Good job and thanks.

How in the hell did you figure that out????

Techie

Unfortunately, the change to "USA" has the same problem as making any of the other region code changes from "US"; e.g. to "UK" or "XX" or "" in the formula. It works the first time it is entered without any problem, however, if "USA" is in the formula already and then the GetQuote function is executed through the "UpdateQuotes" button of the add-in, the results are extremely inconsistent. Some quotes are returned while others produce an invalid result. Then, changing from "USA" to anything else will result in the return of the correct quote or other stock information.

Is anyone getting a different result when running the "UpdateQuotes" to successfully return a series of quotes in a spreadsheet without having to change the region code each time? If so, what version of Excel are you running and what steps did you use to get the "UpdateQuotes" macro to run consistently?