Choose your own company and repeat the analysis from Problem 1. You can get the data from MSN Money at money.msn.com/investing. To retrieve the data for your company, enter the ticker symbol to get a quote. Now choose Financials and then select the statements. Display the annual income statement, select the entire data section and copy. Now paste this data directly into a new worksheet. The data will be pasted in HTML format. In Excel 2010, a Smart Tag will appear that will allow you to either "Keep Source Formatting" or "Match Destination Formatting." Experiment to see which one you like best. Repeat these steps for the balance sheet.

At the time of this writing, MSN Money uses data from Thomson Reuters. The data have been consolidated into consistent categories for easy comparison of different companies. However, there are sometimes mistakes and repeated data, which you may need to clean up. If you need error-free data, you should use a source such as Standard & Poor's Compustat or the SEC's Edgar database.