Microsoft Excel: Inserting financial data and prepare it for analysis.

One of the most important steps before every analysis of financial data in Microsoft excel is the import and preparation of the data. In this article, I will show you how to import and prepare data.

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Import your data.

Let’s take a company as an example. I choose Apple (AAPL).

We first go to the ‘Historical Data’ tab.

I will set my time period to ‘max’ to download all the historical data of the company.

The following data is included in the download document. The problem is that all data is contained in one column. So, I would need to select the whole column and slice the data by using a comma as a separator.

Preparation

We select ‘delimited’ and then ‘next’

We then select ‘comma’ and then ’next’.

Finally, we select ‘finish’.

Our data is then separated into a different column and now we can start calculating.