External Data Refresh Failed

Anonymous
2020-12-23T16:53:51+00:00

Had no problems on an existing spreadsheet for months.  I am pulling in stock quotes.  Today I started getting this message:

External Data Refresh Failed  "We refreshed some of your data, but we couldn't refresh all of it because we changed or removed it on our side.  For data we can no longer refresh, we've kept the most recent results.

How do I fix it and how do I identify the cells that are not refreshing?  

Thank you!

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2021-12-14T05:37:56+00:00

    I found that my problem wasn't really in my stock list but in a cell where I had copied the stock name from the list to another page where I had done a calculation on a stock I had sold. It wasn't a stock I expected to update so I hadn't looked on that page. Not sure if the symbol was even valid as I was no longer following the stock, it may have changed symbols in a consolidation. Once I deleted the symbol everything worked as it should.

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  2. Anonymous
    2021-12-13T08:25:03+00:00

    I have already done this. It's a good idea, because if the stock identifier has changed without one noticing, this could throw up the error but I've checked all 35 of mine and they all update successfully when copied to a clean workbook. It seems Excel now throws out this error message (which didn't used to be the case) if any cell contains a formula which is different to those beside it if, and only if, one does a data refresh.

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  3. Anonymous
    2021-12-13T00:02:27+00:00

    I agree that MSFT could do a much better job of addressing the problem.

    The solution I posted worked for me. I did run into the inconsistent formula problem but didn't have that many.

    Might I suggest that you copy and paste your stocks to a new sheet without any formulas and try and refresh all data then use the error check tool to see if it will isolate the problem cells.

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  4. Anonymous
    2021-12-12T09:03:22+00:00

    That doesn't work. Nor does the more complete 'solution' of error checking, options and then unclicking all of the 'error checking rules' except for 'cells containing data types that couldn't refresh'.

    In my case that takes me to an almost endless series of formula which are highlighted because they are inconsistent with adjacent formula but they are inconsistent for a reason. For example, some share prices are pulled in £, others in pence and some in US$, so they have to be made consistent either by dividing the prices in pence by 100 or those in US$ by the exchange rate.

    It's ridiculous that Excel has begun generating these error messages and no one at Microsoft seems to care about fixing what is pretty clearly a bug.

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  5. Anonymous
    2021-12-11T22:24:31+00:00

    Re 365:

    I solved the problem by opening a page; clicking on the formulas tap at the top of the page then click on error checking.

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