We are a UK based investment club investing mainly in shares on the London stock market. A number of members had different ways of keeping track of our shares - mainly by using ‘portfolio’ facilities offered on a number of financial web sites. This was not ideal as individual members had to keep their own portfolios up to date - whilst others didn’t have the technical ability to do this.

As we had our own web site we had for some time been looking for a way of posting share prices to the site and enabling any member to get the latest picture without themselves having to do anything other than log on. I had been trying various on line spreadsheets but none were satisfactory until I discovered the ‘external data’ function in Editgrid. This allows on line prices to be shown in a spreadsheet with only the usual 15 minutes delay and continually updated. And the spreadsheet can be posted live to our web site. You can see this at www.midasinvestmentclub.org.uk - go to the Portfolio page.

In recent days I also discovered a new function which will post Reuters stock price charts in the spreadsheet. There is a template available for these, but thanks to Editgrid’s helpful and speedy response to my questions I have now discovered how to generate these from scratch. The charts are also posted to the website. Members can now get an up to date valuation and watch the trends in the charts by simply going to our site. I believe Editgrid to be the most useful of all the on line spreadsheets - and I think I must have tried them all!