A Better Browser

There are two (probably more actually) types of people in this world.  One type likes to focus on the "qualitative" aspects of things, while the other is quantitative.  The qualitative type likes pictures, and editorial when trying to make a decision on whether to buy a stock.  The quantitative type likes numbers.  Cold, hard facts that they can manipulate themselves and use to make comparisons and do analysis.  If this is the case, and I think it is to some extent, why then shouldn't we have different types of "browsers" for these different types of people?  I propose that Internet Explorer and Netscape are the browers of choice for the qualitative types, but Excel should be the browser of choice for the quantitative types.  The value of Excel, which all the number crunchers can attest to, is that you can do your own thing.  You can do what ever you want with the data be it sum it, divided it, calculating the standard deviation on it, the moving average, comparing it, or plotting it.  Try doing that in a browser?  Not so easy is it.  

If you concur that Excel is a better tool for the quants than a browser, the next question is how do you get the content of a web site into Excel?  The last thing you want to do is to cut and paste from a browser into Excel.  Lots of time and effort, when there is a better way.  That better way is a tool in Excel called "Web Queries".  Web Queries are a standard feature implemented, I believe, in Excel 97.  The value of web queries is that you can define in an "iqy" or query file, an url, and parameters that you want to pass to it.  Thus if you wanted the ability to pull stock quotes into Excel for further analysis, you could do so.  The advantage of this over cutting and pasting, is that once you define a web query and embed it in your worksheet, the content flows dynamically into your sheet.  Thus if you were looking at a Cisco quote, then want to see an IBM quote, you change the symbol in your sheet, and trigger a "refresh" command that goes out and gets the data for IBM.  This provides to you a simple open access facility that you typically only get in professional financial products.

It's important to point out however, that this is not a perfect solution.  The problem, is with the nature of html, in that it is not really structured data.  Thus when you're looking at an HTML table, today Cell 1 and Row 2 maybe a stock quote, however you will only know this by looking at the table.   So, programatically you can not necessarily figure out what piece of data is in what cell in a table without the detailed visual analysis.  (That's one of the purposes of this site, in that we will do the analysis for you so that you don't have to.)  The other main problem is that this content may change from time to time, and even worse from query to query.  This is especially true when accessing a site that has a lot of advertising.  Again however, that is the purpose of this site, to keep up with and to maintain that "mapping", to the best extent possible, in order for you to use the data in your analysis.