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Apr 9, 2024 3 MIN

Bring your own data to Excel with the OpenBB Add-in

The OpenBB Add-in for Excel addresses a crucial need for Excel-based data solutions in the financial sector. It offers easy access to Terminal Pro's financial datasets, including historical prices, fundamentals, analyst estimates, and news, directly within Excel. But there's something more.

During my tenure in the Mergers & Acquisitions Department of an investment bank, Excel was an essential tool for constructing company valuation models. However, it was challenging to replicate the precise data seen on the Terminal directly into Excel. Additionally, we often encountered data limitations for the day and month, significantly hindering our work.

Therefore, I am particularly enthusiastic about tackling these challenges. Additionally, we are at the forefront of enabling users to securely incorporate their own data into our Excel Add-in. This innovation greatly facilitates both internal and cross-team collaboration, enhancing overall productivity.

- Minh Hoang, Head of Product at OpenBB

Data standardization is at the core of OpenBB for Excel, offering our users a consistent and reliable dataset from a diverse range of asset classes, from equity, fixed income, and cryptocurrency to macroeconomics.

This seamless fetch of data means you can readily compare across providers and update it instantly, ensuring accuracy and saving you valuable time.

The OpenBB Terminal Pro is the first AI-powered financial terminal with a focus on customizability.

It allows users to create their own organization dashboards using widgets that display financial data.

OpenBB Terminal Pro - Equity Template

To ensure that users can see the same data in Excel, the corresponding Excel formula can easily be found directly on each widget.

This way, users can look for the formula on Terminal Pro and simply copy it to use in Excel.

It’s as simple as it sounds:

The innovative "Bring Your Own Data" (BYOD) feature

With the "Bring Your Own Data" (BYOD) feature, investment firms can now bring their private data into Terminal Pro and, therefore, into Excel.

There are multiple ways your firm can do this:

  • Incorporate your own backend (proprietary dataset and internal code)

  • Enjoy our native integrations to popular databases: Snowflake, MySQL or SQLite

  • Connect to a public API

  • Upload a single CSV/Excel file

After that, the data you’ve brought into Terminal Pro will be automatically available in Excel with the OpenBB Add-in.

You can access your data connectors from OpenBB Terminal Pro inside Microsoft Excel using the OBB.BYOD function.

When in Excel, you can use the formula “OBB.GET” to extract specific fields from financial datasets by slicing rows, columns, or range subsets.

For example, while “OBB.ECONOMY.CPI"portugal")” will return Portugal's CPI over time, with the first column being dates and the second being the CPI value, “OBB.GETOBB.ECONOMY.CPI"portugal"), 1, "portugal")” will solely return the last value of the CPI for Portugal.

Excel Templates

OpenBB also provides pre-made templates based on analysts’ use cases.

These templates are designed to help users perform several tasks, from equity analysis to economic analysis. They are ready to use, but users can customize them to meet their needs.

If you’re curious about these templates, watch a quick video demo here or read more in our documentation.

Get a 3-week free trial

OpenBB invites everyone to sign up for a 3-week free trial and explore the OpenBB Terminal Pro and Add-in for Excel.

Start free trial

For more information, visit our Add-in for Excel Documentation, or feel free to contact us.

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