Federal Reserve Economic Data

Description

Federal Reserve Economic Data (aka FRED©), is a free source of economic data by the St Louis Federal Reserve. FRED provides data for over 260,000 US and international time-series from over 75 different sources. Source items include interest rates, economic data, and more.

Often, it becomes necessary to download data for further manipulation and analysis. That's a process this Google Sheets add-on automates. The FRED website has a free add-in for Microsoft® Excel®. The add-in provides one-click instant download of economic time series and the ability to instantly refresh and update spreadsheets with newly released data. This product is modeled after the Excel add-in. Current users of the Excel add-in will be familiar with the data output and refreshing capabilities that is also offered by our product.

The Google Sheets add-on is offered free to the Google community as a service of Brad Smith, CPA, LLC. Features: The google add-on includes many of the same feature as the Excel add-in:
- Download single or multiple series at once
- Refresh data by individual series or all series at once
- Specify certain download parameters
* Manipulation code (default is download as reported. Example is percentage change)
* Start date (default downloads all data from inception)
* Frequency aggregation (for example, aggregate weekly data on a monthly basis)
- Series search: Filter search by tag name
- Find series id by browsing popular data
- Create custom graphs for single or multiple series

Even if you are currently using the excel add-in, you will want to add this product to your arsenal of tools. Beside's its ability to quickly download and refresh economic data from the Federal Reserve website, installation of this add-on has the following unique advantages over its Excel add-in counterpart:
- Available anywhere you have access to the Internet.
- Not limited to PCs with Excel installed.
- Platform independent. Should work on your android phone or tablet.
- No need to install future updates. Add-on is always up-to-date.
- Fast updating with server-to-server connection.
- Additional download parameters:
* Data presorted by ascending (default) or descending order.
* Aggregate data by average (default), sum , or end of period.
* Once a series has been downloaded, clicking the small black triangle in the upper right corner of the cell containing the series id will reveal more information about that particular series.