Installation - EconData

User Guide > Installation

This help file outlines which software you can use to access EconData.

Excel Add-In

Our EconData Excel Add-In pulls the latest, up-to-date time series data (from any of the datasets supplied in EconData) into your Excel workbooks. The series will be structured as two columns with some headers: the left-hand column gives the date and the right-had column gives the values. You can, for example, overwrite previous data pulls to update graphs or quantitative models that are linked to that range.

To use the Excel Add-In, first create an account on www.EconData.co.za, then, in Excel, go to the Insert ribbon → Add-ins → Get Add-ins → search for “EconData” → add the app → and sign in to the app, using your EconData credentials.

For more guidance, please see our tutorial.

R package ☍

The R package can be installed with the following sequence of commands, in R:

library(remotes)
install_github("coderaanalytics/econdatar")
library(econdatar)

Pulling data in R

An example of how you can pull structured data, using the read_dataset() function, is as follows. The data are provided in two tables in a list (the data table and the meta-data table), which can be linked with the data key. The data table contains the time period, values, and the data key (a concise encoding of the concept). The meta-data table gives more detail about each data key.

library(econdatar)

data_raw <- read_dataset( id        = "POPULATION_DATA_REG",
                          releasedescription = "latest",
                          version   = "latest",
                          tidy      = TRUE,
                          wide      = FALSE,
                          compact   = FALSE     )
str(data_raw)

You thus need to use an ID when calling the data. We outline the IDs in Available Data. We have sample code like this on GitHub, at econdata-blog/docs/concept-checker.R

Full details about the read_dataset() function.