Free Investment Research Training!

Don't miss the virtual Morningstar Investment Research Center training session on Wednesday, April 29 at 2:00pm.

It can be accessed at any location with phone and Internet access. To register, simply e-mail librarytraining@morningstar.com and mention Missoula Public Library in your email.

We will also be offering 6 seats for this training in our Computer Classroom. Space is limited. Call 721-2665 to reserve your seat.

In the meantime, learn how to export data from Morningstar so that you can have historical financial statements and stock quotes where you need them, when you need them. Read on!

The Training Corner | by Lars Wasvick, Associate Product Manager

What Is the Exporting Thing?

Client feedback is something very important to us at Morningstar. In our most recent survey, many clients told us that Morningstar Investment Research Center should consider exporting capabilities. After months of development, you can now export stock price history and historical financial statements.

So where is it?

As excited as we are to have this capability, exporting is not one of those features that jumps out at you from our home page. However, I promise it is in there, so if you haven't found it yet, just read along.

All stock pages have the same format. Running down the left side of the page you will see a number of different tabs. If you click on Financial Statements you will see a new set of tabs and 10-years' worth of numbers. Scroll down to the bottom right corner and you will see a prompt, Export to Excel. Simply click and you've got a 10-year Income Statement. Just follow suit for Cash Flows and Balance Sheet to get your data.

Now for daily price history you will want to click on Dividends & Returns tab on the left side of the page. In about the middle of the next page there is a heading Price/Dividends/Splits and just beneath that is the price history. Slide over to the right and you will see five years listed. Click on a year to get the closing price for each trading day of that year. Right at the top you will find the Export to Excel tab. Click there and you will get the designated year in an Excel spreadsheet.

To save you cumbersome cutting and pasting, you can also get five years of price history together. You will find that option back at the Dividends & Returns page. At the far right of the price history section you will find the prompt. Click that and you will get each closing price for the past five years.

I will be demonstrating export functionality along with many other features during the Patron Training Session.

C) Copyright 2009. Morningstar, Inc.

Looking for a job?

The Morningstar Investment Research Center Job Search

The Training Corner | by Lars Wasvick, Associate Product Manager

The unemployment rate rose to 7.6% in January 2009. Did you know Morningstar's Stock Screener can assist in your job search?

Access the Morningstar Investment Research Center by going to our website, www.missoulapubliclibrary.org. Click on "E-databases" and then click on the "Morningstar" link. You will need to enter your library card number if you are accessing the database from home.

When looking for a job, it's important to identify your criteria. Where would you like to work geographically? Would you like to work for a small, medium, or large company? What industry would you like to work in? And maybe most importantly, is that a financially healthy company? When you take this sort of reverse approach, you can really dig down and find companies that you may like and want to work for.

So let's get started with a company search using my preferences: I want to find a company in Illinois that has around 2,000 employees and is in the publishing industry. (One caveat: The companies we cover are only on the major exchanges, so that limits searches to public companies, but that still leaves more than 10,000 companies to screen from.)

To set up my screen I go into the Stock Screener. Under General information I choose Location of Company, Illinois. The next point is Number of Employees. Don't worry about the distinction between big and small. We have that broken down in quartiles, for some context on size. For my final screen setting, I find Stock Industry and set that equal to Publishing.

Voila! I've found two companies that fit my criteria. Now I can look at company profiles, access their Web sites, and find job openings.

Obviously, this is a far stretch from searching job sites and the classifieds, but for the persnickety job seeker, it's something to consider. For anyone else, brushing up on company information before an interview is always a good idea.

(C) Copyright 2009. Morningstar, Inc.