How do I Create a Stock Chart in 2007 With Multiple Stocks?
Microsoft Excel 2007 has charting tools that will allow you to compare multiple stocks and their price movements in one stock chart. This is useful for several reasons including trying to determine which of several stocks are more volatile and should or shouldn't be included in a portfolio. Another reason for a charting comparison is how the returns on stocks compare to either the industry leader or to an overall index. Whatever your reason, Excel 2007 has built-in functionality to meet your stock charting needs.
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Instructions
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Open Microsoft Excel 2007.
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Download or collect all the closing share price data and relevant dates. Yahoo Finance is a good source and includes the option of downloading the data in Excel format, simplifying your data and charting task immensely.
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Title the first cell in column A "Date" then either manually fill in all the relevant dates in the cells vertically or, if data is already in Excel format, copy and paste the data into the cells.
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Title the top of column B with the name of the first stock, and continue titling the respective columns (i.e., column C to the column for the last stock name that you are tracking).
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Input the stock prices in date order, vertically for each respective stock. Depending on the variation in stock prices you may want to add factoring to be able to better compare stocks. For example, ABC stock may have a price of $354 while Widget stock may have a pricing of $17.25. From a charting perspective the charts will show a wide divergence in price, as it should. However if you are trying to compare the movement of the two stocks there is an advantage to factoring down the $354 by dividing it by ten. This will give you a clearer picture of how the two (or more) stock prices compare in their respective movements. If you use factoring however always put a note in a cell below the chart stating what the rate of factoring was for each stock, for example "Stock price for ABC was reduced by a factor of 10."
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Highlight the area including the column headings.
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Click on the Insert tab and in the Charts section choose Line Graph. From the drop down menu choose Display Trend over Time (first option).
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Tips & Warnings
There are online comparison charts available if you do not have Microsoft Excel 2007 for example, Yahoo Finance has a good stock chart comparison tool.
References
- Photo Credit stock graph drawing image by .shock from Fotolia.com
