The Scenario
It's Monday morning at 7:30 AM and your investment committee meets at 9. Someone on the team added a comment to the shared workbook last Thursday: "can someone pull the recent rating changes before the meeting?" That someone is now you.
The bad version:
- Log into Benzinga's ratings terminal, filter by each of the 60 portfolio tickers one at a time, scan for upgrades and downgrades in the last 30 days.
- Copy the analyst firm, the action, the old rating, the new rating, and the new price target into a staging area — then realize the column headers in the committee workbook use different names and reformat everything.
- Miss two tickers because the Benzinga UI paginated the results and you didn't scroll.
Your firm doesn't keep you around to pull analyst data tables. It keeps you around to know which of those rating actions actually matter and why. The 90 minutes of lookup work is exactly the wrong way to spend the hour before a high-stakes meeting.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your portfolio holdings and, through its built-in Benzinga integration, fetches analyst rating actions across all tickers in one prompt — no per-ticker lookups.
Pull Benzinga ratings data for the tickers in column A of my Excel table for the date range in B1:B2 and populate columns B–F with analyst firm, rating action, prior rating, new rating, and new price target
What You Get
- Columns B–F populated with one row per rating action per ticker
- Tickers with no rating changes in the window get a single row noting "No actions in period"
- Actions listed newest-first within each ticker's block
- New price target displays as a numeric value; tickers where no price target was set show blank
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
What if my ticker list includes some international symbols Benzinga doesn't cover?
Pull Benzinga analyst rating changes for the date range in B1:B2 for all tickers in column A of my Excel table. Skip any tickers where Benzinga returns no coverage and log them in column G as "Not covered" — write the successful results into columns B through F
What if I only want to see upgrades and downgrades, not initiations or reiterations?
Pull Benzinga analyst rating changes for the date range in B1:B2 for all tickers in column A of my Excel table, filter to only upgrade and downgrade actions, and write ticker, analyst firm, action, prior rating, and new price target into columns B through F in a new worksheet called "Rating Moves"
What if some tickers in my workbook appear on a separate "Excluded" worksheet that I want to skip?
Pull Benzinga analyst rating changes for the date range in B1:B2 for tickers in column A of my "Holdings" worksheet, skip any ticker that also appears in column A of my "Excluded" worksheet, and write the results into columns B through F on the Holdings worksheet
What if I want the rating changes plus each ticker's current consensus rating in a single table?
For each ticker in column A of my Excel table, fetch Benzinga rating actions from the date range in B1:B2 and the current Benzinga consensus rating and target average, then write rating action, analyst firm, new rating, new target, consensus rating, and target average into columns B through G — one row per action, consensus data repeated on each row for that ticker
Combining the individual action feed with the consensus view in one prompt saves the second lookup entirely.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a column of portfolio tickers, then ask it to pull the last month of rating actions before your next committee meeting. The article on compiling consensus analyst ratings picks up right where this one leaves off.