Stock quotes using Google docs spreadsheet

Do you use Yahoo Finance or some other site to track stocks you either own or want to buy?  Did you know that you can do so using Google Docs using GoogleLookup and GoogleFinance functions?  Once I heard this, I decided to give it a try.

Let's assume you put the name of the company such as Google you are interested in cell A2, with the stock ticker symbol in B2

=GoogleLookup(A2,"ticker")   will give the stock ticker symbol of GOOG
=GoogleFinance(B2,"price")   will give the current stock price
=GoogleFinance(B2,"low")     will give the lowest stock price of the day
=GoogleFinance(B2,"high")   will give the highest stock price of the day

In addition to the parameter of price, low and high, you can also use priceopen, volume, marketcap, tradetime, datadelay, volumeavg, pe, eps, high52, low52, change, changepct, closeyest, shares and currency.  Most of these are self-explanatory.

Using these functions in a spreadsheet, I can now analyze companies in a given sector much easier now.  There is so much more here that can be explored and I will continue to do so.

The only problem I encountered was finding the stock ticker symbol for a few companies using the GoogleLookup function.