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Research Insight is a database published by Standards & Poor that
contains twenty years of financial data for thousands of publicly traded domestic corporations. It is available over the PC local area network and is accessible from any of the main campus computer labs. Obtaining a Report from
Research Insight
| 1. |
Open
Microsoft Excel and select Open Report from the S&P
menu. |
| 2. |
After selecting Open Report from the S&P menu, a File
Open dialog box will open. In
the body of this dialog box, you’ll see a list of Compustat
reports. These reports are
organized in logical folders just as in Microsoft Windows.
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| 3. |
Select
the report that you want to produce by double-clicking on its name or by
highlighting the company name and clicking on the Finish button at the
bottom of the dialog box. |
| 4. |
After selecting your report, a Run
Assistant dialog box will appear.
Notice that this dialog box has tabs across the top:
Screen, Set, etc. To build
a report for just ONE company, you should be on the Screen tab (the
default tab).
Type in your company’s ticker symbol in the Companies box and
click OK at the bottom of the dialog box.
If you don’t know your company’s ticker symbol, then you can click
on the Look Up button. Note
that your cursor should automatically be in the Companies box when this
dialog box opens so it’s difficult to get mixed up at this point.
Also take note of the options under the Find Similar Companies
section. You can build a report
of a group of companies within the same classification, e.g., SIC, Industry
Sector, etc. If you don’t want
to do this, then leave this at its default setting, Don’t Find Similar
Companies. Click OK
once you are ready to run your report.
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| 5. |
If you are interested in making comparisons between companies, then go to
the Set tab. Again, we are
still in the Run Assistant dialog
box. To add companies to your
comparison list, type each company’s ticker symbol in the Add Company to
set box and click the Add Company button.
Once you do that, you’ll see the name of that company in the Added
Companies box in the middle of the right hand side of the dialog box.
Please
note that there is also a Look Up button that functions as mentioned
before and that there is also a button that will allow you to remove companies
from the list if you change your mind. Each
company must be added one at a time, and a list of ALL of the companies that
you’ve added to the comparison set will be on the left-hand side of the
dialog box. Once you’ve added
all of the companies that you’re interested in, click OK to run the
reports.
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| 6. |
After
clicking OK to run the report, the report will appear on the screen as
a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. In order to navigate between several reports
(remember, you may have produced reports for two or more companies for
comparison purposes), you must select the company that you want to view from
the drop-down box in the toolbar.
The drop-down box lists the names and ticker symbols of the companies
that you included in your report run.
That’s
it. From here, you can save the
report(s) to a disk as an Excel file, but don’t forget to clean-up the
reports and make them look nice before you submit them as part of your
assignment.
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