TL;dr: Google added proper stock charts to Sheets this week, the HLC and OHLC kind with the little bars and ticks, and for the first time they survive the trip between Excel and Sheets instead of getting discarded on import. If you run any kind of market tracker for work, in treasury or FP&A, this is worth an hour of your time, because you can now build a self-updating tracker with GOOGLEFINANCE that looks like a real market screen instead of a sad line chart.

What shipped is simple. Two new chart types under Insert then Chart: High-Low-Close, which draws each period as a vertical bar from the low to the high with a tick for the close, and Open-High-Low-Close, which adds a tick for the open so you can see at a glance whether the period ended above or below where it started. The rollout started October 5 for Rapid Release domains and October 22 for Scheduled Release, and it covers every Workspace customer and personal accounts, so you probably have it already or will within days.

The part I actually care about is the Excel fix, because this is the one that has bitten me. Until now, if someone built a workbook in Excel with stock charts and you imported it into Sheets, the charts were silently dropped and you got to rebuild them by hand. Google says HLC and OHLC charts now survive the round trip in both directions. If your team passes workbooks back and forth between the Excel people and the Sheets people, and every finance team has both, that quiet data loss is finally gone.

So here is the tracker I would build. Start a tab with your tickers in column A. In the next columns, pull the day's open, high, low, and close with GOOGLEFINANCE, something like =GOOGLEFINANCE("TSE:RY","open",TODAY()-30,TODAY()) for a thirty-day history, and do the same for high, low, and close. The historical form of GOOGLEFINANCE returns a little table with the date and the values, which is exactly the shape a candlestick chart wants: label first, then low, open, close, high, in that order. Select the table, Insert then Chart, and change the chart type to Candlestick. That is the whole setup, and it refreshes itself every day.

Next to it, add the columns that make it a working tracker instead of a picture. Day-over-day change against the previous close, with conditional formatting so down days go red and up days go green, and a sparkline of the last thirty closes so you get the trend at a glance without another chart. That combination, the candlestick for the shape of recent trading and the change column for the number, is what makes it something you would actually open every morning.

Now the honest limits, because there are several and they matter. GOOGLEFINANCE quotes are delayed about twenty minutes on most exchanges, so this is a morning-check tool, not a trading screen, and anyone who needs real-time prices already knows that. GOOGLEFINANCE can also be temperamental, with occasional gaps on thin tickers and attributes that silently return blanks, so I would not build anything load-bearing on it without a fallback source. And the candlestick chart itself is a daily chart; there is no intraday view here. Within those boundaries, though, it is a genuinely useful little market screen, built from one function and one chart type, living in the spreadsheet where your models already are.

The template is below. It is the tracker described above, with the ticker column, the GOOGLEFINANCE formulas, the change column with formatting, the sparklines, and a candlestick chart already wired up. Put your tickers in and it starts working.

Template: template: Market tracker with candlestick charts (Google Sheets, make a copy to use it)

- Francois