Excel Essentials

How Tickerdata results behave in Excel — busy cells, spilled arrays, errors, and number formats.

This page applies to Microsoft Excel.

Excel handles add-in functions a little differently from its built-ins. Five things surprise people on their first day; none of them are faults.

#BUSY!#BUSY! means it is working

While a formula is fetching, the cell shows #BUSY!. Excel shows this for any add-in function that has not returned yet — it is not an error, and it clears on its own. Enter a column of formulas at once and you will watch them settle one after another.

Errors arrive as #VALUE!#VALUE!

Excel only lets a custom function return one error type, so every Tickerdata problem — an unknown ticker, a misspelled attribute, an expired session — comes back as #VALUE!.

The actual message is attached to the cell. Hover over it, or click the yellow warning marker beside it, and you will see the explanation, for example that the ticker was not recognised. Some older builds of Excel drop the message and show only a bare #VALUE!; if that happens, Common Errors lists what each one usually means.

Every result is an array

Tickerdata always returns a dynamic array. Most of the time that array is one cell by one cell, so it looks and behaves exactly like a plain value — you can add it, chart it, and reference it as normal.

Some requests genuinely return a table. Ask for dividends without a time period and you get the whole dividend history:

=TICKERDATA.DATA("AAPL", "dividend")

That fills the cell you typed in plus the rows and columns below and to the right of it. Leave that area empty.

#SPILL!#SPILL! means something is in the way

If a result needs more room than it has, Excel refuses to write any of it and shows #SPILL! instead. Something — a stray value, a leftover label, a merged cell — is sitting in the range the result needs.

Click the cell, and Excel outlines the range it was trying to fill. Clear anything inside that outline and the result appears immediately.

Big numbers show as scientific notation

A cell with no number format applied displays large figures the way Excel prefers:

3.83285E+11

That is Apple’s revenue, not an error. Widen the column, or select the cells and apply a number format — Home → Number Format → Number, or a custom format such as #,##0,,"M" to show millions.

Tip

Formatting sticks to the cell, not to the formula, so format the range once and every later refresh lands in it already formatted.

Next steps