Is there a free way to get Interactive Brokers account, positions, and orders into Excel?

[streamxls-dev]

A question people ask in IBKR trading forums — answered here so it's searchable.

[streamxls-dev]

The short answer: no single free IBKR Excel tool streams account, position, and order data together — the modern one (RTD) stops at market data, and the two that carry account and order data (DDE and ActiveX) are the older or more code-heavy paths.

The TWS API download ships sample spreadsheets for three Excel technologies — RTD, DDE, and ActiveX — described in IBKR's documentation as demonstrations "not intended to be used as production level trading tools." Each covers a different slice of the API, and a fourth path — manual export — is the fallback:

	RTD sample	DDE	ActiveX	Manual export
Account / position / order data	No — market data only	Yes (as of API v975)	Yes	Yes, as files
Live streaming	Yes (push)	Yes	Yes	No — snapshots
Keeps Excel responsive	Yes, by design	Can block the UI	Varies	N/A
Setup and maintenance	Lightest	Heavier configuration	Most code	Scriptable

Per IBKR's TWS API documentation, the RTD sample is scoped to market data: "only top-level market data is supported via TWS RTD Server API. No trading capability or other data types are supported." The two built-in paths that do carry account and order data are the heavier ones: DDE is a decades-old protocol that can block Excel's interface, and IBKR notes its ActiveX Excel API "is more difficult to program as compared to other Excel APIs and not as robust as non-Excel socket-based API applications."

Sources: IBKR's Excel APIs overview, TWS RTD Server, and ActiveX documentation. Longer walkthroughs: RTD vs DDE vs ActiveX and the account/positions/orders gap.

StreamXLS keeps RTD's push model and non-blocking behavior and extends it to the data the sample leaves out: account values (130+ fields, per-currency), positions with live P&L, and order monitoring all stream through the same =RTD("Tws.Rtd",, …) grammar as quotes, and a StageOrder topic family stages orders in TWS for you to review and submit there. StreamXLS connects to TWS or IB Gateway, live or paper account, and is in production use by its author every trading session.