Why “topics” are helpful

A "topic" is a collection of data on a specific subject. There are dozens of them and they cover a wide range of subjects from unemployment in major countries, to live electricity usage in New York. Mostly they are statistics that have been in the news or are frequently of interest. Accordingly, a good number of the main economic releases can be found in this section. (We’ve initially focused on data from the UK and US, but we’ll be getting around to the rest of the world soon!)

A topic might contain between a handful and hundreds of related data series. The key thing about topics is that the data in them have been selected and curated by us to make it easy for you to see and use. Some of the topics are shown in the box on the “Free public data” home page but there are dozens more to be seen when you click on the orange “Click to view all topics” button.

The screen below shows what a typical topic page looks like - in this case detailing the monthly energy production and consumption in the US, split into types of energy. You will see the graph on the right and the ‘toolbox’ to the left.
 
 
So, how do you compare series?
 
To add another series to the graph simply go to the toolbox and tick the little box next to the desired series. And another line on the graph will pop up. Click on the ticked box to remove it from the display. We are comparing data!
 

 
 
This is a relatively small topic with only 13 series, so it’s easy to find your way around around. We show eight series in the list at a time, so you can’t see all the data at once – use the ‘next’ button at the bottom of the list of series to scroll through it. (This becomes the ‘previous’ button once you are past the first page.)