[mfd]

there are modules out there that already do this using Yahoo finance. I'm not sure what kind of programing background you have but you can look at these ones

http://www.transparentech.com/opensource/yahoofinance

http://search.cpan.org/~edd/Finance-YahooQuote-0.21/YahooQuote.pm

 

[mfd]

I am a Google Spreadsheet and Google Finance fan.

For example, to get the latest Apple Inc. stock price you type this in the google spreadsheet cell:

=googlefinance("AAPL", "price")

If you want a list of closing prices for a date range you can type:
=googlefinance("AAPL", "close", "2009-01-01", "2009-05-31")


Read more here
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54198

Just to add to this. Last I remember there is no way to tie a symbol with a specific index. So if you have a symbol on the TSX for companyA and a symbol on the S&P 500 for companyB then by default google docs will take the S&P 500 companyB

 

[mfd]

How do I get the latest stock prices into a MS spreadsheet rather than a Google spreadsheet?

You can't. This is only a function that works within google docs.

However if you have excel 2007 you can import the quote table from yahoo finance. Here is how you import from the web http://www.nirmaltv.com/2008/10/23/how-to-import-html-tables-to-excel-sheet/ . The information will refresh automatically

 

[mfd]

Actually you can import data with excel 2000 as well.

Here is a template that does it. It uses MSN money instead of Yahoo to do the import http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/excel-stock-quotes.html

 

[mfd]

I use Quick tax tracker....this software is more gear to tracking stocks for tax purposes (ie capital gains, loss, average price, costs, dividends, etc).

I really couldn't find anything in excel that did that and I was having a problem developing on on my own


There is another thread here that discusses software that you might be interested.