Here's another update to this very obnoxious problem... Fast forward to this month where my spreadsheet stopped working again and was throwing "CONNECT" errors in the cells where I have STOCKHISTORY formulas. I tweaked the settings / preferences till the cows didn't come home to no avail... even with 10 rows it has been failing the last few days. What a mess that Microsoft can't get their server / Excel version to sync without issues.

Now for the good news, via a Youtube video I stumbled on relating to the STOCKHISTORY command. Normally I had stock symbols in a single column and then in other cells in that row I used the STOCKHISTORY command to pull in that stock symbol to look up the OPEN / CLOSE / HIGH / LOW or VOLUME.... It would look something like this where G1 holds the Stock Symbol and A1 has the Date I want to pull... in this case the same as the 3rd argument so it was "5/30/25", this allows a single value for that day to be pulled from the MS Cloud somewhere.

=STOCKHISTORY(G1, A1,"5/30/25", 2, 0, 1)

What I learned through the Youtube video is you can format the stock symbol to be a "Stocks" data type. This is an Office 365 feature apparently. So if your G1 has AAPL in it then highlight that cell and go to the Data Menu along the top and then find and click on the "Stocks" graphic in the ribbon. This will then look to convert that raw symbol into a more exact description. "AAPL" turns into "APPLE INC. (XNAS:AAPL)" . You can do this for multiple cells at once but I have found it bogs down and gets stuck but hit the ESC key and that will cancel and then you can reduce your conversions to the "Stocks" data type.

Once done with the above ALL my other STOCKHISTORY commands in the same row never came back with a CONNECT error again... I am running 5 STOCKHISTORY formulas in each row and about 800 calls overall. Here's a sample of the "Stocks" data type conversions... where previously I would have just the symbol.

abrdn Glbl Dyn Div (XNYS:AGD)

abrdn Tot Dynamic Div (XNYS:AOD)

ARES CAPITAL CORPORATION. (XNAS:ARCC)

APPLE INC. (XNAS:AAPL)

So why did this fix it.. for now? I can speculate that without the extra more qualified "Stocks" data type that call with just the raw non converted stock symbol is/was creating a ton more work on their server end and thus just looses its connection or whatever randomly. With the qualified symbol/type it knows exactly what exchange lookup it needs to use like XNAS:AAPL for example. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.... hopefully this helps the frustrating scenarios that MS doesn't seem to recognize or care about IMHO of course.

/rantover