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Free data on Quandl!

Quandl (http://www.quandl.com) . One of my favourite finds ever. Lots of free data, just pick what you like or need and download it.

Since my time as a business analyst at a large Dutch bank I’ve developed a weakness for financial instruments, especially currencies. So when I found Quandl I was thrilled and couldn’t wait to collect all the data and to start slicing and dicing.
So I downloaded some .csv files (or xml, xls, json) and started building vizzes in Tableau.

Great!

Now what?

Next day I returned to my little project and because of Greece / ECB / some government / some bank (can’t remember what precisely) the financial world had shifted.

Cool! Now my vizzes will reflect the changes!

But then it hit me: I would need to go over all the instruments I harvested earlier (about 10 at that time) and get all the latest data.

OK… I can do that.

But… what if tomorrow again Greece / ECB/ some government / some bank (can’t predict what precisely)…. A well, you probably get the point.

Automate!

Enter CloverETL, my favourite tool when it comes to connecting to data and shaping data.

I’ll bother you with the details in another post but here are the basic steps I took to automate getting data from Quandl:

• structure your data carefully. Try to think ahead, In my case not only currencies, but also other instruments and how to group them
• choose your favourite Quandl API and build Clover graphs to retrieve the data from Quandl
• select a refresh period and schedule accordingly
• enjoy your automatically growing pile of (financial) data!

And here it is:

The result (so far)

My first draft (and yes, I know, it will never ever really reach V1.0) is uploaded to the completely renewed Tableau Public. Click, slice, dice. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: 

Because I published this workbook to Tableau Public, it is not automatically refreshed. Do you want an in-depth demo of the complete setup? Contact me at info@c-data.nl