Gissing Software, which specialises in the routing of market and trade data, has released a new version of its RealtimeXL application.
Version 2.0 will allow users to automatically convert their legacy Microsoft links to Microsoft’s Real-Time Data (RTD) technology. Gissing claims the new functionality is an important breakthrough, because it enables users to benefit from the improved performance and reliability of RTD, while removing the risk associated with updating their links manually.
“A surprising number of banks are still using DDE technology – which is incorporated in applications such as Reuters Personal Data Dictionary (PDD) and TIBCO’s Tiblink, despite the fact that the use of DDE protocol is no longer encouraged,” says Nick Braybrooke, product manager for Gissing RealtimeXL. “Until now there hasn’t been a convenient and easy way for financial institutions to migrate to RTD, but Gissing RealtimeXL v 2.0 changes this. We are already speaking to customers about how we can enable a seamless migration – allowing them to benefit from greater processing efficiency, reliability and faster execution of calculations based on real-time data.”
The RTD server technology superseded DDE in Microsoft Excel version 2002, making it easy to bring real-time data into Excel for analysis. If offers an improvement over DDE because the RTD protocol is lighter, resulting in faster execution, says Gissing. RTD can be used interchangeably with intrinsic Excel functions in macros, cells, and formulas. RTD is designed specifically to update data in spreadsheets in real-time and therefore creates a more accurate spreadsheet with real-time market and trade data.
Gissing RealtimeXL allows spreadsheets to be migrated individually or in batches. Both the legacy DDE and the new RTD-enabled spreadsheets can be run in parallel until users are entirely comfortable with the new technology. Once the no-risk migration is complete, spreadsheets function faster with more reliability and users can be assured that both the underlying Gissing RealtimeXL and Microsoft applications are fully supported.