New Data Handling Features

EViews 7 offers a number of features for data handling. Among the highlights:

New Workfile Frequencies

EViews 7 offers built-in support for high-frequency (intraday) data, allowing for hours, minutes, and seconds frequencies. In addition, there are a number of new workfile frequencies, including Multi-year, Bimonthly, Fortnight, Ten-Day, and Daily with an arbitrary range of days of the week.

Easy-to-use dialogs let you describe regular frequency intraday data. Simply provide information about the frequency of observations within the day, the days of the week for which you observe data, and the time, and the time range of observations within a day. More complicated irregular frequency data structures may be created by specifying a data series containing the date/time information for each observation.

In addition, newly introduced special workfile functions (@HOUR, @MINUTE, @SECOND, and @HOURF) have been added to provide intraday information for each observation in the workfile.

Strings

Strings and string processing assume a newly prominent role in EViews 7. Central to this importance are the introduction of the concept of string lists, an expanded library of string functions that includes routines for string list processing, new objects for holding strings (string and svector), and enhanced programming support for working with strings.

The enhanced role for strings opens the door to a wide range of operations and greatly enhances the existing EViews programming language.

Direct Support for the FRED Database

FRED® (Federal Reserve Economic Data) is a publicly accessible database of more than 20,000 U.S. time series of multiple frequencies, provided by the Economic Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The FRED database offers a wide variety of freely downloadable data, including interest rates, exchange rates, national income accounts, and many others. Data found in FRED are drawn from several national and international sources and are updated frequently. Did we mention that FRED data are free?

Prior to EViews 7, importing data from FRED required that the data first be downloaded into either a Microsoft Excel or text file, and then be imported into an EViews workfile. EViews users can now use EViews to directly connect to, open, query, and import data from the FRED database using the familiar EViews database interface.

For more information on the FRED databases, please see http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2.

Support for Reading Excel XLSX Files

The Excel 2007 default XLSX format is based on open XML standards. Excel 2007 files are incompatible with older versions of Excel and could not be read by EViews 6.

EViews 7 offers read (but not write) support for XLSX files.

Improved Foreign Data Import

EViews 7 offers a new command for importing data from a foreign file (or previously saved workfile) into an existing workfile. You can, for example, use the new import command to merge data from an Excel file into your workfile, or to append data from a SPSS file into an existing workfile.