Sometimes, large entities have enough money to throw at a problem that by sheer magnitude they produce something great (albeit at too high a cost). The iPhone app from the FRED is not that thing. But the Excel add-in is something that every macroeconomics professor should consider adding to their toolkit.

Personally, I include links to FRED content in the lecture notes that I provide to students. But FRED makes it easy to do so much more. They now have an add-in that makes accessing data *much* faster. With it, professors can demonstrate in excel their transformations that students can easily replicate. The advantage is that students can learn to access and transform their own data rather than relying on links that I provide them.

The tool is easy enough to find – FRED wants you to use it. After that, the installation is largely automatic.

Installed in excel you will see the below new ribbon option. It’s very user friendly.

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