Refreshing Data in Excel

Excel never re-runs Tickerdata formulas on its own. Here is how to refresh them.

This page applies to Microsoft Excel.

Excel does not refresh on its own

A Tickerdata formula runs once, when you enter it. After that Excel treats the result as settled and never re-runs it — not on a recalculation, not on a timer, not when you reopen the workbook.

That means the two buttons you would reach for do nothing here:

  • Formulas → Calculate Now (and F9) recalculates Excel’s own formulas, not Tickerdata’s.
  • Data → Refresh All refreshes queries and connections, which Tickerdata is not.

Reopening a saved workbook shows the values that were saved with it. Excel gives no indication that they are old, so a price from last Tuesday looks exactly like a price from this morning.

Warning

If a number matters, refresh before you rely on it. Nothing in Excel will tell you it is stale.

How to refresh

On the Home tab, open Tickerdata → Refresh:

Menu itemWhat it re-runs
Refresh AllEvery Tickerdata formula in the workbook
Refresh HistoricEvery TICKERDATA.DATA formula
Refresh LiveEvery TICKERDATA.LIVE formula

The same three buttons are in the task pane, under Refresh.

Splitting the two is worth the habit: prices move all day, but a 2023 income statement does not. Refresh Live on a large workbook is far quicker than refreshing everything.

Refreshing still uses the cache

A refresh re-runs your formulas, and those formulas go through the same cache they always do. If a value was fetched recently enough, the refresh returns the cached copy rather than a new request — which is what keeps refreshes fast.

So if you need a value that is fresher than your plan’s cache window, refreshing alone will not get it. Open the task pane, expand Data looks wrong?, and use Clear cached data, then refresh. That discards every cached response on this machine and fetches them again. It does not sign you out.

Two things a refresh does to your workbook

It goes into the undo stack. Refreshing re-enters your formulas, so Excel records it as an edit. Ctrl+Z after a refresh undoes the refresh, and the workbook is marked as having unsaved changes even if nothing visible changed.

A protected sheet can stop it. Re-entering a formula on a protected worksheet fails, and one protected sheet anywhere in the workbook can fail the whole refresh — including sheets you were not looking at. Unprotect the sheets, refresh, then protect them again.

Next steps