A great place to get data to show in class or for your students to work with is FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data), which has 61,000 series. FRED data can be imported into Excel with an add-in and then used to create graphs, change levels to percentage changes with a click of a mouse all within one Excel spreadsheet. You can find the data and the add-in here: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2
More recently the St. Louis Fed released a free FRED app for iOS and Android Devices. Look here for details. This is an invaluable tool for courses that explore the economy today.
First Published : April 23, 2013