Etrade export to Excel, worthless (2023 Update)

John Polasek wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I don't do etrade, and don't have enogh stocks to bother either. However, I would strongly suggest to import the data (as an csv or comma separated file) into a simple text editor. Make your screen window wide enough, delete all formatting, and then set a special delimiter to separate the stocks from each other (something like ###, followed by a carriage return). Now replace all carriage returns with a tab character (same thing for linefeeds if they are present). Next replace all ### (or ###linefeed) with a carriage return, so each stock now starts on a new line. Make sure there are sufficient tabs to separate the fields you need, then save as a csv file. That should be importable into Excel.

If they don't or it doesn't bring results in time, you might try using the gnu stream editor to masticate what's available into the format you need. It's available at

You use regular expressions to program the conversion. Han's approach should work too.

Hope this helps

Mike

Thank you Both for your detailed suggestions. I don't know if I could make it work.

We wouldn't really need Excel, if only they would implement the common Windows practice of being able to click on a column to do a sort. That's all the magic we need out of Excel, just to be able to sort by date sold or dollars gained, but all they offer is a list that remains stolidly alphabetical with respect to symbol and a horsed up format that even includes blocks three lines high.

I have a suggestion for purveyors of Windows-based applications and that is to make it a requirement that they have a suggestion box. There is no reason why they can't clean up that operation, although more than likely the programmer left several years ago.

DTNIQ is like that. They have a sparse collection of features for managing your portfolio (>$1000/yr), but the programmer must have quit

10 years ago. You can't edit your input by deleting to the left. That key has been disabled, probably for good and sufficient reason, and over the past five years at least, I have asked them to put it back. Probably they don't know how. To increment a price alert, they offer as the least increment 1%-not having the common sense to realize that 1% is a giant change even for a whole day or week, so it's no good to a trader.

Does anyone have a good replacement for DTN IQ? Thanks.

As a former C and UNIX programmer I almost always found awk easier to use than sed for tasks like this.

Although I've never used it, the Gnu version (gawk) is available here:

Jerry

My mistake! I found out by accident that the columns in the E*TRADE portfolio page will sort by clicking on top of the column, to a large extent eliminating the need for export to Excel. Lots of time wasted! More time wasted: the portfolio page has a box called VIEW with seven selections. It took some experimentation to find out that the correct one is called PERFORMANCE, being the only one to show dollar change for each stock and its total. My thanks to those who responded. John

All of that doesn't have anything to do with Quicken.

On the other hand, why not use the data that is in Quicken to do your analysis?

I'm also in a real battle with etrade and how poor their new design is. They took away the excel feature which is making it near impossible to do my taxes.

replying to John Polasek, moonlitenite wrote: You need to import the CSV data to excel or openoffice and use a "separated by COMMA" and it formats it perfectly fine.

All I can say is - 12 years later - same old frustration regarding security name in one line - totally useless as it, you have to do a lot of manipulation in excel after downloading before you can use the info. Drives me crazy - found this old post searching for what I hoped was a solution!