Refreshing Data in Excel
Excel never re-runs Tickerdata formulas on its own. Here is how to refresh them.
Excel does not refresh on its own
A Tickerdata formula runs once, when you enter it. After that Excel treats the result as settled and never re-runs it — not on a recalculation, not on a timer, not when you reopen the workbook.
That means the two buttons you would reach for do nothing here:
- Formulas → Calculate Now (and F9) recalculates Excel’s own formulas, not Tickerdata’s.
- Data → Refresh All refreshes queries and connections, which Tickerdata is not.
Reopening a saved workbook shows the values that were saved with it. Excel gives no indication that they are old, so a price from last Tuesday looks exactly like a price from this morning.
Warning
How to refresh
On the Home tab, the Tickerdata group holds a Refresh menu beside the button that opens the task pane. Open it:
| Menu item | What it re-runs |
|---|---|
| Refresh All | Every Tickerdata formula in the workbook |
| Refresh Historic | Every TICKERDATA.DATA formula |
| Refresh Live | Every TICKERDATA.LIVE formula |
The same three buttons are in the task pane, under Refresh.
Splitting the two is worth the habit: prices move all day, but a 2023 income statement does not. Refresh Live on a large workbook is far quicker than refreshing everything.
Refreshing still uses the cache
A refresh re-runs your formulas, and those formulas go through the same cache they always do. If a value was fetched recently enough, the refresh returns the cached copy rather than a new request — which is what keeps refreshes fast.
So if you need a value that is fresher than your plan’s cache window, refreshing alone will not get it. Open the task pane, expand Data looks wrong?, tick the box to confirm — it is what enables the button — then click Clear cached data and refresh. That discards every cached response on this machine and fetches them again. It does not sign you out.
Two things a refresh does to your workbook
It goes into the undo stack. Refreshing re-enters your formulas, so Excel records it as an edit. Ctrl+Z after a refresh undoes the refresh, and the workbook is marked as having unsaved changes even if nothing visible changed.
A protected sheet can stop it. Re-entering a formula on a protected worksheet fails, and one protected sheet anywhere in the workbook can fail the whole refresh — including sheets you were not looking at. Unprotect the sheets, refresh, then protect them again.
Next steps
- Excel Essentials —
#BUSY!, spilled results, and reading errors - Common Errors — what each error message means
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