🗂️ Top 10 Open Data Sources

Real & Free Datasets to Practice Excel, Power BI & AI

Curated collection of open data sources with context and practical applications for projects, classes, dashboards and professional content.

Use these sources to build dashboards, tutorials, AI experiments, cleaning projects or LinkedIn / YouTube content without exposing sensitive data. Each card includes context, 5 practical applications and the direct link.
1
Kaggle Datasets
Community, competitions, datasets
›

Kaggle is the world’s largest platform for open datasets. It includes thousands of real datasets on business, marketing, finance, HR, health, climate, transportation, sales, and much more. Most datasets come with notebooks, explanations and discussions that make learning easier.

5 practical applications:

  • Practice real data cleaning for Excel tutorials.
  • Create business dashboards comparing industries.
  • Generate educational content for LinkedIn / YouTube.
  • Train simple Python models and compare with Excel.
  • Build corporate use cases for presentations and classes.

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets

2
Data.gov
U.S. Government open data
›

Data.gov is one of the largest and most reliable public data repositories. It contains over 300,000 real datasets from agriculture, transportation, public finance, health, education, safety, climate, energy and more.

5 practical applications:

  • Build government dashboards (crime, traffic, etc.).
  • Create real examples without using internal company data.
  • Practice Power Query with up-to-date public data.
  • Run state and city comparisons.
  • Storytelling with official government data.

https://www.data.gov

3
Google Dataset Search
Global dataset search engine
›

Google Dataset Search works like regular Google, but focused entirely on datasets. It searches thousands of repositories from universities, governments and research institutions.

5 practical applications:

  • Find exact datasets for a specific project.
  • Locate data for Excel cleaning exercises.
  • Build Power BI dashboards from international sources.
  • Get themed datasets for content series (health, climate, etc.).
  • Reproduce or validate published analyses.

https://datasetsearch.research.google.com

4
World Bank Open Data
Global development indicators
›

The World Bank provides clean, standardized datasets on economy, energy, health, education, poverty, technology, infrastructure and more. Time series extend over decades, allowing long-term analysis.

5 practical applications:

  • Create professional macroeconomic visualizations in Excel.
  • Compare indicators across countries.
  • Practice basic forecasting with historical data.
  • Storytelling with global development indicators.
  • Teaching materials for economics and analytics.

https://data.worldbank.org

5
UCI Machine Learning Repository
Classic ML datasets
›

UCI contains real datasets used in machine learning research. Includes datasets on health, marketing, telecom, surveys, sensors, human behavior, finance and more.

5 practical applications:

  • Create predictive models in Python and explain them in Excel.
  • Practice advanced data cleaning.
  • Convert scientific papers into business dashboards.
  • Compare ML methods vs traditional analytics.
  • Teach classification, regression and clustering.

https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/index.php

6
Zenodo
Open scientific research
›

Zenodo is an open repository created by CERN. It includes scientific, academic and technical datasets from AI, climate, physics, biology, economics, psychology and more.

5 practical applications:

  • Create scientific dashboards in Excel / Power BI.
  • Explore high-quality datasets for advanced technical content.
  • Build dashboards from real research results.
  • Develop cleaning tutorials with complex datasets.
  • Use academic data for AI and statistics experiments.

https://zenodo.org

7
Our World in Data
Global indicators
›

Our World in Data offers clean datasets and ready-to-use visualizations about health, climate, energy, education, agriculture, technology, population and more.

5 practical applications:

  • Create global comparison dashboards (CO₂, GDP, population).
  • Teach Excel / Power BI using fresh, updated data.
  • Storytelling with global data for social media.
  • Practice long-term time series analysis.
  • Develop public policy or social impact projects.

https://ourworldindata.org

8
Data.world
Collaborative data platform
›

Data.world is a collaborative platform where governments, NGOs and companies upload open datasets. Includes business, weather, education, HR, transportation, inventory and more.

5 practical applications:

  • Build real business mini-projects using public data.
  • Practice SQL directly from the browser.
  • Create dashboards simulating real business processes.
  • Teach ETL using Power Query.
  • Generate educational content your audience can replicate.

https://data.world/datasets

9
OEC – Observatory of Economic Complexity
International trade
›

OEC includes detailed datasets on imports, exports, industries, product flows, trade routes and global economic structure.

5 practical applications:

  • Build trade dashboards by country or region.
  • Compare economic structures across nations.
  • Create trade-flow visualizations.
  • Storytelling for LinkedIn and presentations.
  • Identify industry trends and opportunities.

https://oec.world

10
Mozilla Common Voice
Voice, audio, AI
›

Common Voice is a global project where thousands of people donate voice recordings and transcripts. One of the largest open datasets for voice and NLP projects.

5 practical applications:

  • Build basic voice-recognition or command models.
  • Analyze accents and linguistic patterns.
  • Convert transcripts into Excel-ready datasets.
  • Develop NLP projects such as tokenization.
  • Create educational content about applied AI.

https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en/datasets