St. Louis Fed Launches the FRED Add-in for Microsoft Excel

ST. LOUIS -  As part of its ongoing efforts to increase the public’s access to economic data, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has developed an economic data add-in for Microsoft Excel.  The FRED® (Federal Reserve Economic Data) add-in for Excel is available at https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred-addin/

The FRED add-in is designed for users of economic data, such as students, professors, business economists and financial analysts, who have a basic knowledge of Excel but may not be familiar with the features of FRED, our signature economic database.  With the add-in, users are able to download economic data housed on FRED directly into Excel.  They can select data by the specific data series ID or from a list of FRED’s most popular datasets.  Users can also create graphs and perform data manipulations with the aid of the FRED add-in’s customization tools.

Additional features include:

• full access to FRED’s  collection of over 40,000 economic data series from 38  regional, national and international sources;
• quick and easy data manipulations;
• instant refresh and updating of previously developed spreadsheets when new data are released; and
• the ability to graph data with the National Bureau of Economic Research recession shading for additional analysis.

The St. Louis Fed has also developed add-ins for the 2003 and Mac OSX versions of Microsoft Excel.  Beta versions of these programs are available at https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred-addin/

The FRED add-in uses the FRED application programming interface (API).

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis is a leader in providing online economic information.  In addition to FRED, the St. Louis Fed provides ALFRED® (Archival Federal Reserve Economic Data), which contains vintage economic data from specific dates in history; GeoFRED® (Geographical Economic Data), which allows users to map FRED data at state, MSA or county levels; FRASER® (Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research), a library of historic U.S. economic and banking publications; and CASSIDI® (Competitive and Analysis Structure Source Instrument for Depository Institutions), the source for analyzing banking competition.

For more information about the St. Louis Fed’s online economic information, see https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/

FRED® is a registered trademark of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.