Is there a way to automatically export data from Excel? - excel

Question

I have a worksheet that automatically gets updated with live stock price data. At the moment we have a very messy solution of copying periodically to the clipboard and manipulating the data from there.
Is it possible to instead automatically export data to CSV every time a price change is detected? I'm guessing it would involve VBA.

Answer 1

You can treat excel file as a data source and you may query it.
See google results: http://www.google.ro/#sclient=psy&hl=ro&q=excel+data+source+sql+query&aq=0&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=b0efac6ab816e29b
I will try to find a specific article for you.

Answer 2

I'd suggest the following strategy:
Fire up your worksheet and switch into "design mode"
Right-click the button which updates the stock info and try to find out to which macro the button is bound to
Open the VBA editor (ALT+F11)
Choose the "Workbook"-Section
From there select the "Open" Event/Method
Write a simple loop with a delay which calls the macro mentioned above periodically and programmatically save the excel-sheet as CSV
The code would be somthing like this (can't check it as I don't have access to excel right now):
Private Declare Sub Sleep Lib "kernel32" (ByVal dwMilliseconds As Long)
Public Sub Workbook_open()
Do While True
Call name_of_macro()
ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs Filename:= _
"c:\path/to/file.csv", FileFormat:=xlCSV _
, CreateBackup:=False
Sleep 10000 'Sleep 10 seconds
Loop
End Sub
This example is just intended to show a rough solution. As Jean-Francois pointed out, this piece of code will NOT update everytime a change is detected, it will update every 10 seconds, even if the data is still the same.

Answer 3

You can use an Application.OnTime to set up a function to get called on a regular basis.
The following function gets called by Excel every 30 seconds. Either call it once to kick off the schedule or just set Application.OnTime once when your worksheet opens to get it running.
Public Sub DoExport()
' do your export to CSV logic here
Application.OnTime Now + TimeValue("00:00:30"), "DoExport"
End Sub

Answer 4

This will do the trick:
Sub LoadNewValuesAndCheckForChange()
Dim rngMyValues As Range
Dim varBefore As Variant
Dim varAfter As Variant
Dim iRow As Long
Dim iCol As Long
Dim booValuesHaveChanged As Boolean
Set rngMyValues = Range("B4:D9") ' Or wherever your data is
varBefore = rngMyValues ' Save old values in an array
' Call the function that loads your new stock prices here...
varAfter = rngMyValues ' Get new values
' Loop through all cells to see if anything has changed.
booValuesHaveChanged = False
For iRow = LBound(varBefore, 1) To UBound(varBefore, 1)
For iCol = LBound(varBefore, 21) To UBound(varBefore, 21)
If Not varAfter(iRow, iCol) = varBefore(iRow, iCol) Then
' Change detected!
booValuesHaveChanged = True
End If
Next iCol
Next iRow
If booValuesHaveChanged Then
' Save .csv file with timestamp in filename
ActiveWorksheet.SaveAs _
Filename:="c:\myfile" & Format(Now, "yyyymmddhhnnss") & ".csv", _
FileFormat:=xlCSV
End If
End Sub