Recommended: FRED Add-In for Microsoft Excel

I use the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) from the St. Louis Federal Reserve on almost a daily basis and for those of you that also access these data on a regular basis, you might be interested in the free "FRED Add-In for Microsoft Excel" available here.

 According to the St. Louis Fed, 

"This Add-In is free software that will significantly reduce the amount of time spent collecting and organizing macroeconomic data. The FRED add-in provides free access to over 30,000 data series from various sources (e.g., BEA, BLS, Census, and OECD) directly through Microsoft Excel.

Key Features:

• One-click instant download of economic time series.
• Browse the most popular data and search the FRED database.
• Quick and easy data frequency conversion and growth rate calculations.
• Instantly refresh and update spreadsheets with newly released data.
• Create graphs with NBER recession shading and an auto update feature."

MP: I just downloaded the FRED Add-In and tried it out, and it works great. It does save time by accessing FRED data directly in Excel, compared to going to the FRED website, downloading datasets in Excel format and then opening those datasets in Excel.  To help get started you can review the 5-minute tutorial video on the Fed's website.