Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Popular Topics #2

As we discussed last week, in the 8-year publication of this blog, there have been several popular topics that have gotten more than their share of views. Besides the Insert Function Wizard, the ability download Currency Rates directly into Excel has been a remarkably trendy subject.

Longtime users of Excel probably know that Microsoft used to provide a connection to their MSN data source.  That, perhaps unfortunately, is no longer the case, so Excel users are faced with finding an alternative.

This being the case, FloatRates.com has become a popular website to get this data. Their XML data is easily extracted, and users do not need to do anything fancy with the parameters.  If you are looking for the latest US Dollar exchange rates, click on http://www.floatrates.com/daily/usd.xml and choose View Source in your browser to obtain the Excel-friendly data which you can copy into a worksheet.

From within your worksheet, using Get External Data / From Other Sources / From XML data import will help Excel to ignore the innate formatting and use the XML data only. With a little practice, you will find that it is not difficult.

Well, it may not be quite as easy as in The Old Days, but getting your current exchange rates into Excel is still pretty easy to do.  All this talk about exchange rates makes me think, Is it time for a vacation yet?...


Cheers!

No comments: