We are pleased to announce the launch of EconData’s Excel Add-in! The application allows the users of EconData to seamlessly integrate up-to-date South African economic data into their Excel workflows. It also provides convenient transformations of the data such as: aggregation to lower frequencies, and the calculation of growth rates.
In order to install the add-in you will need to open Excel, head to the Insert tab, and click “Get Add-ins” towards the middle of the ribbon. Search the store for the EconData Add-in and click “Add”.
Once installed the EconData tab will appear in Excel, navigate to the tab and click “Sign in” on the ribbon. This will bring up the taskpane where you will be able to sign in with your account, or you can navigate to the website to register a new account if required.
Once signed-in, you will be brought to the data selection interface which would be familiar to anyone that has used the web application before.
We’ll take a look at price data in this tutorial, specifically headline CPI. We select the CPI Analytical Series data set and select the All urban areas – CPI Headline data series. We can leave the release as well as the metadata toggle unchanged and click “Import to Excel” to have the data downloaded into the worksheet.
As we can see the download includes additional metadata about the series in rows 7 to 11 (the data in rows 1 to 6 are mandatory). This data is omitted when the metadata toggle is turned off. Below the metadata is the time series showing all available dates and values.
Suppose we are not interested in the monthly index of CPI, but rather the quarterly growth rates. We can use the drop-down boxes in B3 and B4 to select the desired frequency and transformation and then click the “(Re)calculate” button on the EconData ribbon.
When new data is released we can “(Re)calculate” again to draw in the new data (you can also use the “Refresh” button for this, but it won’t apply any transformations). Note that data downloaded from the web application can also be refreshed in Excel using the add-in (this won’t work with old spreadsheets though).
We hope that our users find the add-in convenient and useful, please feel free to report issues or give feedback via email.
The Codera Analytics team
#data #Excel #Tutorial
Impressive