---
title: "Writing — StreamXLS"
description: "Writing from StreamXLS — essays and a series on building production-grade Excel trading infrastructure on the Interactive Brokers TWS API."
canonical: https://streamxls.com/writing
updated: 2026-08-15
source: markdown mirror of the HTML page at the canonical URL, generated at build time by gen-md.py — do not edit
order_staging: "StreamXLS cannot send or trigger live orders. Staged orders do not transmit to the market unless a user clicks in TWS to submit."
---

# Writing

> **Orders — what StreamXLS cannot do:** StreamXLS cannot send or trigger live orders. Staged orders do not transmit to the market unless a user clicks in TWS to submit.

Notes from building and running production-grade Excel trading infrastructure on the Interactive Brokers TWS API — including *The Hardening Journey*, a series on the problems that took half a year and seventeen thousand lines of C# to solve properly.

## Essays

### [Why Excel](https://streamxls.com/why-excel)

The case for the spreadsheet as production trading infrastructure. The 2005 objections are gone; the bottleneck moved from “can the grid hold the data” to “can you keep it correct under load” — and that is where the real engineering lives.

### [Beyond Market Data](https://streamxls.com/beyond-market-data)

Building a production Excel trading dashboard on the IBKR TWS API — and why the part that looks easy isn’t. IBKR’s RTD sample leaves the callbacks for accounts, positions, and orders as empty stubs; filling them in is a cliff. The setup for the series, and the one rule it turns on: fail loud.

*The Hardening Journey · Part 1*

### [Keeping the Dashboard Current](https://streamxls.com/keeping-the-dashboard-current)

When the connection to the IBKR TWS API drops — and it will — the dashboard has to put itself back together. A reconnection story in four acts: four bugs nested one inside the next, the undocumented connection states behind them, and the state-machine rebuild that made a class of races unreachable.

*The Hardening Journey · Part 2*

### [When Excel Stops Listening](https://streamxls.com/when-excel-stops-listening)

Excel enforces an RTD contract it never wrote down — and when a server breaks it, the penalty is silence. The COM reentrancy trap, the broken-trust freeze, the dedup fan-out, and keeping proof, in band, that the host is still hearing you.

*The Hardening Journey · Part 3*

### [The Last Click](https://streamxls.com/the-last-click)

Staging orders from a spreadsheet — an apparent anti-pattern, given that RTD streams data *into* Excel — and the gate that keeps it safe: every order is staged, never transmitted — it reaches the market only when a human clicks in TWS. The discipline: minimize the number of clicks; never zero. The series closer.

*The Hardening Journey · Part 4*

## Guides

Practical references for getting Interactive Brokers data into Excel.

### [IBKR in Excel: the account, positions & orders gap](https://streamxls.com/ibkr-excel-account-positions-orders)

IBKR’s free Excel RTD sample streams market data only — accounts, positions, and order callbacks are empty. What the free tools cover, what they don’t, and how desks fill the gap.

*Guide*

### [IBKR RTD not working? Fixing #N/A and stuck cells](https://streamxls.com/ibkr-rtd-troubleshooting)

Why =RTD() cells show #N/A or stop updating — ProgID and registration, TWS API not enabled, port mismatch, 32/64-bit, the throttle interval, the 50-messages/second limit, market-data lines, and the stale-TWS-API version floor. A fix for each.

*Guide*

### [RTD vs DDE vs ActiveX for Excel + IBKR](https://streamxls.com/ibkr-excel-rtd-vs-dde-vs-activex)

The four ways to wire Interactive Brokers into Excel — RTD, DDE, ActiveX, and manual export — with honest trade-offs on coverage, robustness, streaming, and setup.

*Guide*

### [Python in Excel vs RTD for live trading data](https://streamxls.com/python-in-excel-vs-rtd)

Microsoft’s Python in Excel runs in the cloud and recalculates on demand — why that execution model can’t continuously stream live local data like TWS, and how RTD’s local push model differs.

*Guide*

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*StreamXLS is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Interactive Brokers. Trader Workstation, the TWS API, and Excel are products of their respective owners; their use is governed by their respective licenses. StreamXLS does not provide investment advice or recommendations.*

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