The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) has added an Excel data interface, combining its own energy data with ‘Fred’ financial data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. The EIA provides some 1.2 million energy data series while Fred adds 240,000 economic series. Preferred data streams can be captured in an Excel workbook and updated later with a single click. Previously these data sources have been accessible via application programming interfaces (API). The EIA’s Mark Elbert told Oil IT Journal, ‘All our data is also available via the agency’s free data API. You can browse the API online and see sample calls. The API calls allow up to 100 series to be fetched at a time. For systems that want to ingest entire data sets there is a bulk data download facility. The files and a manifest are updated with each release.’
‘Within the spreadsheet, you can browse each data repository by category or search by keywords to find data IDs and to download the series information and data. Once the desired data series are downloaded, all of Excel’s rich functionality is available to create analyses and graph results.’ Both the EIA and the Federal reserve offer the data services and Excel add-ins free of charge as part of their commitment to open data.
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