The FRED Excel Add-In - Getting Economic Data Has Never Been Easier

Paul Krugman posted briefly on his blog last month about a free excel tool called the FRED add-in (Federal Reserve Economic Data). This tool by the St. Louis Fed is a simple, yet essential for anyone who likes working with and analyzing economic data. Basically, this excel add-in streamlines the process of downloading/importing economic data into a spreadsheet. And it fits nicely into the current excel interface (see screenshot below).

I won't bore you with how to download and install it, but I would like to highlight some of the useful features.

• You have over 30,000 economic time series just a click away.
• You can easily update data once new information has been published.
• Data manipulations can be performed on any data set that you download. My favorites are percent change from the previous period and the natural log (I'm finding out in grad school that economists are quite fond of this transformation).
• Ability to change the frequency of aggregation (daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual)
• A streamlined graphing process! Other than the actual importing process, I think the graphing feature is my favorite thing in the FRED add-in. I mean, mainly because I can shade US recessions on my graphs for the first time ever. It doesn't get much better than that!
•  You can also create a multiple series graph in a matter of seconds and create a secondary vertical axis while you are at it. 

Recession shading...

I hope you find this tool as useful as I have. As I play around with it more, I'll update this post with any other cool features that I stumble across. Here is the user's guide if you want to learn more about the FRED add-in.

What sort of economics tools, software, or websites do you use to look at economic data? Are there any other excel add-in's out there like this one? I would love to here from you in the comments section below or tweet me with your comment @zack0liver.