Unbalanced Undated Panel

[vasiliki332]

Dear group,
I'm trying to create an unbalanced undated panel. I use the same variables (14) for 26 different companies. However, the observations vary between the companies. For example, for the variable age one company (A) might have 40 obs. and another company (B) might have 130 obs. So, my panel is unbalanced. Moreover, it is undated since, for example, the first obs. of company A does not refer to the same year/month/ etc. as the first obs. of the same variable of company B.
In order to include all the obs, I created an Unstructured/ Undated workfile with 200 obs., which includes my pool. I stacked my data in a new page and thiw gave me an unstructured/ undated workfile of 5200 obs.
Here comes my question: I changed the workfile structure to Undated panel, choosing balance starts and typing id01 as the identifier series. EViews asked me to create CELLID series and then, warned me that this will create a 2 dimension unbalanced undated panel. I clicked yes and that gave me the attached workfile. My question is if this is how my data are supposed to look like. It's the first time that I try to create such type of panel. I thought that it would give me firstly, the obs. of the first company, secondly, the obs. of the second company and so on.
Can you please help me? Is the attached file the correct output?
Thank you in advance.

[EViews Gareth]

You have created a 2d panel, yes. I'm not sure I can comment any more than that.

[vasiliki332]

Dear EViews Gareth,
Thank you for your reply. Maybe I wrote a lot and confused you. My question is; is this how an unbalanced undated panel looks like? I have used only balanced panels so far and I haven't found any examples of unbalanced undated panels on the web and its structure seems odd to me.
Moreover, in order to help others that might read this thread, is the approach that I followed correct in order to create an unbalanced and undated panel?

[EViews Gareth]

The panel you created is not unbalanced.

Creating a new unbalanced panel is tricky. Most of the time you just bring in existing data and create an unbalanced panel from that.

[vasiliki332]

EViews Gareth,
thank you for your immediate response. Is there a thread on how to create an unbalanced panel that I can read?
P.S. When I estimate equations on the results table I get "Total panel (unbalanced) observations:". Why?

[EViews Gareth]

The structure of your panel is balanced. But the data used in the estimation was unbalanced (you have NAs).

[vasiliki332]

Thank you once again.