Justin:
I am a long time, but not expert, user of Excel and a long time, and even less expert, investor. In reading your posts about some of the difficulties that you have encountered in getting and keeping the MOS calculators up and running, I had a thought which you might want to consider.
First, I don't want any of the comments I make to be regarded as a criticism of any person or any of the activities that have been undertaken to produce such an awesome tool. I am guessing that the major difficulties are associated with web enquiries (about which I know nothing) and the likelihood that free data sources are likely to change things from time to time. I fear that those remarkable individuals who have been so free with their time in creating the spreadsheet may lose their enthusiasm if they feel obligated to perform surgery every few days to keep it operational. Also, it is most unfair for those run-of-mill members such as myself to expect (or at least hopee for) so much and contribute so little. I suspect that some members find the spreadsheet most useful in calculating the growth rate based on BVPS, the sticker price, and the MOS. For someone like me, I don't find the calculations too difficult but it is very time consuming to look up the data points and the spreadsheet when operational is a marvelous time saver.
I have only the vaguest hope that my suggestion has, on balance, much merit so I will not feel badly if it is disregarded out of hand. Even if it has merit, the result will not even approach the goals that may be within reach if the current difficulties can be overcome by the efforts you appear to be making. In short, I hope that an alternative strategy such as that suggested below will not suggest that the more ambitious efforts should be abandoned.
What I have in mind is soliciting the cooperation of the members to supply some minimum number of data points for only one or perhaps a few stocks. Members who know nothing about Excel could presumably look up the agreed-upon numbers from an agreed-upon source such as MSN or perhaps even SEC filings. Phil's book describes how to find most of the essential numbers on MSN and I am guessing that most of the members have access to his book. The results could then be emailed in a standard format or in some way made available to the spreadsheet authors so as to eliminate the web inquiries by accessing the data base instead. I suspect that the burden placed on the volunteer members should be relatively meagre. If the amount of time required is perceived to be excessive, there may not be enough volunteers to produce a very useful data base and even if there are a great number of enthusiastic volunteers, their enthusiasm may wane over time if the amount of time required is greater than anticipated. I would imagine that most members have a watch list of at least a few stocks that they are already researching so it shouldn't me too much of a burden to supply data for one or two of them.
I have not given a lot of thought to this (which may be obvious) and there are a lot of potential problems. If riding herd on a dozen volunteer Excel contributors is a problem, imagine the difficulties involved in attempting to mpnotpr 1000 (say) volunteer data contributors. In order to get some kind of reliability in the data reporting, it might be necessary to have two (or perhaps even more) volunteers for each stock. It might even be desirable to get them to cooperate via email with each other to resolve discrepancies in their report before it is submitted for the data base. It might be necessary to prepare a 'how-to' manual for the volunteers to guarantee that all are following some standard. It might be desirable to require that a stock pass some minimal screen even before it becomes a candidate for the data base. For example, there are a ton of potentially great buys that are currently not even close to passing a
Rule#1 screen.