Census X11 Update for EViews 4 and 5

X12 Windows XP/2000 Professional Compatibility Fix 

As users of seasonal adjustment in EViews are probably aware, EViews provides a convenient front end to the United States Census Bureau's X11-ARIMA seasonal adjustment software. With EViews, you can specify a series to be seasonally adjusted using X12, and EViews will pass the data off to the Census X12 program, then return results directly into EViews.

Once benefit of this method of performing X12 is that EViews users always perform their X12 procedures using programs provided by Census. A less desirable consequence of this approach is that problems with the underlying X12 programs are passed on to EViews users.

One such reported problem has been an incompatibility between the Census X12 programs included in EViews 5 and Windows XP and later version of Windows 2000. The following describes a downloadable fix for this problem.

Description

On computers running Windows XP or later versions of Windows 2000, EViews users may find themselves unable to perform X11 frequency adjustment. When attempting to frequency adjust a series, an error message of the following form is observed:

  • "X12 has returned an error message. Check the error message and return."

Diagnosis

If you navigate to the directory where EViews is installed (typically "C:\Program Files\EViews4" or "C:\Program Files\EViews5"), you will see two executable files X12A.EXE and X11SS.EXE. Right-click on each file and select Properties to see the properties view of the files. Under the General tab of the properties view you should examine the "Modified" date for each file:

  • x12a.exe (Thursday, May 18, 2000, 4:44:32 PM)

The X12A.EXE file with this date isnot Windows XP and Windows 2000 compatible, and must be replaced as described below. Census has provided us with new Census X112 programs recommended for users running Windows XP and Windows 2000.

Users of EViews 5 who are wondering why we did not install the new programs by default should note that the newer version of this file is not recommented for earlier versions of Windows. In particular, there appears to be a minor issue with Year 2000 compatibility as described below.

Solution

Download and unzip the contents of the following file into the EViews installation directory, overwriting the original X11 files.

Step 1: Download the zip file.

Step 2: Unzip the contents of the file into your EViews directory (typically "C:\Program Files\EViews4" or "C:\Program Files\EViews5".)

When prompted for whether you wish to replace the two existing files, you should click on Yes.

Step 3: Verify the modification dates on the two files.

Navigate to the directory where EViews is installed, then right-click on each file and select Properties. The modification dates should read:

  • x12a.exe (Wednesday, January 23, 2002, 9:24:00 AM)

If updating this file does not solve your problem, you should make certain that the directory name described in the error message is not excessively long (the X12 program has some problems with long directory paths), and that you have write permission to the directory. If either of these is potentially a problem, you may change the directory where EViews writes temp files by selecting Options/File Locations... from the main EViews menu, and altering the temp file path.

Note

While the X12 fix for Windows XP and Windows 2000 allows users with these operating systems to run X12, it does introduce a new Year 2000 incompatibility. Data with observations after year 2000 are not correctly reported in the X12 output. This problem does not appear with the original X12 program. Accordingly users of other Windows operating systems are encouraged not to install this version.