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Should I use Bloomberg to download large amounts of data?

29 views   Last updated on Apr 30, 2025    Databases Bloomberg Data

 

PLEASE DON'T use the Bloomberg Excel add-in to download large-scale, time series data (example below). Duke's academically-licensed Bloomberg terminals have a shared data download limit that cannot accommodate large downloads.

Exceeding the download limit will block all Bloomberg users from downloading. Please be a good data citizen and use another resource if you need to build a large data set for your research.  Email us at reference-librarians@fuqua.duke.edu for help selecting an alternative resource.

EXAMPLE: a large scale download is multiple entities (rows) with multiple variables (columns) over a long time span. E.g. financial statement data for all S&P 500 companies from 2010-2020.