We've just shipped a significant update to the OpenBB Excel Add-in that fundamentally changes how you access financial data in your spreadsheets.
Why OpenBB Add-in for Excel?
If you work in a firm where analysts juggle a patchwork of Excel add-ins for different data sources, you know the pain. Machines slow down, onboarding gets messy, and everyone ends up troubleshooting plug-ins instead of focusing on real work.
That’s exactly what the OpenBB Add-in for Excel solves. Once you integrate all your datasets into the OpenBB Workspace, they become accessible through Excel, all at once, using dynamic formulas.
No more clutter from individual vendor add-ins. It’s a cleaner setup that gets analysts back to interpreting numbers instead of managing software.
One add-in. Every data source. Fewer headaches for your team.
What's new
You can now pull data from any table widget in your OpenBB Workspace directly into Excel.
This means your workflows just got a lot cleaner, since you can now get your Workspace data into Excel with just a few clicks and forget about all the other add-ins your team has been using.
Inside the OpenBB Workspace, on every table widget, you’ll find the option to get an Excel formula that you can then use to access this same data in Excel.
This is how it looks like:
The technical change
Before, formulas were rigid, restricted to specific widgets. For instance:
=OBB.EQUITY.FUNDAMENTAL.BALANCE("AAPL")
or
=OBB.EQUITY.FUNDAMENTAL.INCOME("AAPL")
Now, instead of formulas tied to a fixed list of widgets that we supported, everything is dynamic.
You can reference any backend by name or ID, and point to your specific widgets, giving you access to your complete data ecosystem through Excel.
Here's what the new function format looks like:
=OBB.WIDGET("OpenBB Sandbox", "OBB.EQUITY.FUNDAMENTAL.BALANCE", {"symbol", "AAPL"})
Why we made this change
We're moving away from maintaining individual data licensing agreements and focusing on what we do best: providing flexible, comprehensive access to your chosen data sources through the Workspace interface.
Our CPO, Ihsan Saracgil, wrote about this strategic direction in detail in his recent blog post. The short version: we're not trying to be a data distributor. We're building the infrastructure that lets you work with your data more effectively using AI.
Haven't started using the Add-in yet? This is perfect timing. The new approach offers significantly more power than before.