The reprogramming of somatic cells to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) is lengthy and inefficient. The development of a reprogramming system that allows rapid and synchronous reprogramming to pluripotency is imperative for understanding the mechanism of iPSC formation and for future therapeutic applications. We have recently reported that a short expression in mouse primary B cells of the transcription factor C/EBPα before the induction of pluripotency factors increases the iPSC reprogramming efficiency >100-fold, involving 95% of the cells within a week. Here we present a dataset containing the time course of gene expression during this process as determined by microarray and RNA-seq techniques.