The Scenario
You're an equity research intern and your manager handed you a 50-stock list on Thursday afternoon. The ask: "I need a one-pager with the consensus analyst view on each name — buy counts, hold counts, sell counts, average target — by EOD Friday. It's going into the monthly portfolio review deck."
You have never built this table before. The person who built it last month is on leave.
The bad version:
- Open Benzinga's ratings UI, search each ticker one at a time, find the consensus summary section, copy the values.
- Realize midway through that Benzinga's UI doesn't show strong buy and sell separately in the summary view — you need to toggle to a different section for that breakdown.
- Finish all 50 tickers in two hours, build the table, then get an email at 4:55 PM: "can you add target low and target high too?"
You're not being evaluated on your ability to copy numbers out of a terminal. You're being evaluated on whether the table is accurate and whether it was done by EOD. The two hours of clicking is the thing standing between you and both of those.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your ticker list and, through its built-in Benzinga integration, pulls consensus ratings data for every name in one prompt — strong buys to price targets, all in one pass.
Pull Benzinga consensus analyst data for the tickers in column A of my Excel table and populate columns B–H with: analyst count, strong buy, buy, hold, sell, average price target, and consensus rating
What You Get
- Columns B–H populated with one row per ticker
- Consensus rating expressed as the label Benzinga returns (e.g., "Buy," "Overweight," "Hold")
- Average price target as a numeric value
- Tickers with no analyst coverage get a row with all values blank and a note in column I
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
What if some tickers in column A have been delisted or renamed since the list was built?
Pull Benzinga consensus analyst data for all tickers in column A of my Excel table. For any ticker where Benzinga returns an error or no coverage, log the reason in column I and continue — write successful results into columns B through H
What if the manager wants the output sorted by consensus rating strength, with strongest buy coverage first?
Pull Benzinga consensus analyst data for all tickers in column A of my Excel table, write strong buy, buy, hold, sell, average price target, and consensus rating into columns B–G, then sort the rows from strongest to weakest consensus rating before writing — keep my ticker list in column A as the anchor
What if the deck template needs the data split by sector, and I have sector labels in column B?
Pull Benzinga consensus analyst data for all tickers in column A of my Excel table, then write strong buy count, buy count, hold count, sell count, consensus rating, and average price target into columns C through H — preserving the sector label in column B as the grouping key
What if I want to flag any ticker where the average price target is more than 20% above the current price I have in column C?
Pull Benzinga consensus analyst data for all tickers in column A of my Excel table, write consensus rating and average target into columns D and E, then write "Upside >20%" in column F for any ticker where the target exceeds the value in column C by more than 20%, and leave column F blank otherwise
Running the screen and the data pull in the same prompt means the flagging logic doesn't require a second formula pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a list of equity tickers, then ask it to build your consensus ratings table before the next portfolio review. The article on pulling analyst rating changes covers the individual action-level feed if you need more granularity.