Updated Interface

EViews has always been known for its unmatched ease-of-use, but there's always room for improvement. We've raised the ante in EViews 7 with a number of interface improvements. Here are but a few of the highlights:

Customizable Appearance

Choice is good. And EViews 7 now offers you choice in the appearance of your EViews window so that you may customize the appearance of your EViews environment to use different colors for windows, backgrounds, toolbars, and status bars.

Central to the new appearance options are "themes" providing various "looks" for your EViews window. To access the themes and other appearance settings, go to the main EViews window and select Options/General Options to display the dialog. Select a theme, specify modifications if desired, and off you go.

Changing your theme won't make EViews 7 run any faster, but a fresh new look might make the work seem to go a bit faster.

Enhanced Drag-and-Drop Support

Drag-and-drop support has been enhanced throughout EViews 7. You may now copy objects between workfiles and pages using drag-and-drop. You can even use drag-and-drop to copy entire workfile pages and to retrieve objects from an EViews database.

For example, you may:

• Create a new workfile page and copy the contents of an existing workfile page or foreign source file by dragging the source file or tab and dropping it over the New Page tab in a workfile. A plus ("+") sign will appear when your cursor is over an appropriate area. Alternately, drag the workfile page tab into the open area in the EViews window; a new workfile will be created, and the contents of the source page will be copied into the first page of the new workfile.
• Use drag-and-drop to reorder your workfile pages. You may change the order of your workfile pages by dragging the tab for a page at the bottom of the workfile window, and dropping it on top of the tab for the page it should follow. Note the difference in behavior between dragging a tab within a workfile and dragging across workfiles. The first reorders the pages, while the second copies the contents of one page into another.

• Combine the contents of two pages by dragging the source page tab onto the destination page window. Depending on the objects being copied and the frequencies of the workfiles, you may receive a series of prompts to assist in completing the paste properly.

• Copy a set of EViews objects from within a page by selecting them and drag them where you'd like them to go. The destination object, whether it be a workfile, group, program, model, or the command window, will attempt to accept the paste of the objects. A plus ("+") sign will appear when your cursor is over an appropriate area. Depending on the objects being copied, you may receive a series of prompts to complete the paste.

• There are a variety of ways in which EViews objects may be dropped onto other objects. You may add a seriesto a group either by dragging the series icon onto the Spreadsheet view of the group or by dragging it onto the Group Members view of the group. To add an equation to a model, drag the equation icon from the workfile into the equation view of the model.

  

You can experiment with drag-and-drop to discover the many places it is now available in EViews 7. As you drag and hold your mouse over a target object, you should see a plus ("+") sign when a drop operation is possible, and a circle with a line through it when dropping is not allowed.

Improved Command Interface

Command Editing

EViews 7 adds new features to make editing in the command window even easier. To display a list of previous commands in the order in which they were entered, press the Control key and the UP arrow (CTRL+UP). The last command will be entered into the command window. Holding down the CTRL key and pressing UP repeatedly will display the next prior commands. Repeat until the desired command is recalled.

To examine a history of the last 30 commands, press the Control Key and the J key (CTRL+J). In the popup window you may use the UP and DOWN arrows to select the desired command and then press the ENTER key to add it to the command window, or simply double click on the command. To close the history window without selecting a command, click elsewhere in the command window or press the Escape (ESC) key.

Command Window Undocking

Feeling a bit constrained in the traditional command window? You may now drag the command window to anywhere inside the EViews frame. Press F4 to toggle docking, or click on the command window, depress the right-mouse button and select Toggle Command Docking. When undocked, the command window toolbar contains buttons for displaying commands in the list, and for redocking.

Updated Graph Options Dialog

EViews has always offered a large number of options for customizing your graph output, and EViews 7 offers even more. To better organize all of these options, we have completely redesigned the EViews global and object graph options dialogs so that they use an easy-to-use tree structure. You will find that most of the options are functionally the same, but they have been broken into smaller categories. Instead of tabs along the top of a dialog, we utilize a descriptive tree structure that runs along the left side of the dialog. Simply click on a tree node to display the relevant options in manageable form.

As always, if you double-click on an applicable graph-element (the legend, axes, etc.), EViews will open to the corresponding dialog tree entry.

Updated Global Options Dialog

The various global options dialogs have been consolidated into a single General Options dialog, featuring an easy-to-use tree structure so you may navigate quickly between sets of settings.

In addition to reorganizing the existing material, there are important new settings in this dialog:

• Under the first group, Windows Appearance, you will find a dialog that you may use to set various EViews color palettes using themes.

• Advanced system options offers control over multi-processor/core use.

• Runtime settings, under the Programs group, offers global settings for the new program log message settings that allow you to control which messages are output to the log window.

EViews Auto-Update from the Web

EViews 7 offers an automatic updating feature that can check for new updates every day, and install any updates that may be available. The automatic update feature can be disabled from the Options/EViews Auto-Update from Web item in your main EViews menu. You can also manually check for updates from within EViews at any time by selecting Check now... under the EViews Auto-Update from Web menu item, or by selecting EViews Update from the Help menu.