EViews.com

Hi

I have imported data from the Conference Board, the Total Economy Database, see
https://www.conference-board.org/data/economydatabase/index.cfm?id=27762

The data and my code to import the data can be found below. When importing, there is information about each series in the object called "Measure" which is available in the page "Untitled", see picture below. I would like to attach this information as description of each series in the page "tedl" using the command


How can this be done?

Thomas

Our IMPORT command actually supports reading in your data transposed so I don't think you need to do PAGESTACK.

Also, our IMPORT command supports reading in multiple header rows and marking each as either part of the name, or part of the description, or as an attribute with the same name. You can define all of this using our import wizard.

Note, when the wizard started for me, after selecting the correct cell range/page and then checking the "Read series by row" checkbox, I then had to manually re-define the cell range from A5 to BU1989. Sometimes our wizard can get a little confused in determining the proper range.

Finishing the import wizard generated the following command (actually the generated command included a bunch of extra commas after "DATE", one for each column (or row post transpose), but they were optional as I only needed to rename the first column to "DATE") so I removed them):

Where I treat the "INDICATOR" column as the name of the series object, the "MEASURE" column as the description, and all the other header rows (once transposed of course) as attributes.

I then got a workfile that looked like this:

If I open one of the series objects and look at the Label view, you can see the attributes and descriptions:


If you'd rather have the MEASURE value be it's own attribute instead of being stored as Description, just change the last colheadnames element to say "Measure" instead of "Description".

This is great, thanks for your elaborate answer. Your way is much more efficient than mine!

I have a follow up question: How can I change the import command so that the last part of the series name is the iso code for the country, e.g. "capital_input_ict_usa"? (see picture below)
Thanks again!
Thomas

Just change "Iso" to "Name" in the colheadnames argument:


When you define multiple column headers as Name, EViews simply concatenates each value together to be the final name. But because the ISO header appears before Indicator, you'll see the Iso value appear before the Indicator value in the new name.

If you want the Iso value to appear 2nd, you'll have to re-order the header rows (columns in your case) in your Excel spreadsheet so that Indicator appears first (to the left of Iso), then adjust your colheadnames argument appropriately to reflect the re-ordering.

Oh, and by doing it this way, you'll lose the ISO attribute on the object since it's now part of the name.

great, thanks again for your help!
Thomas