EViews.com

Hi,

Here's the issue. I want to create an Eviews workfile (page) using an existing excel file the lazy way, ie without first creating a new file (file-new etc)
When I drag and drop the attached excel file in the appropriate area (just open the program, and drag the excel file in the workfile page area (a '+' appears)) in my Eviews 7 (dec 8 build) the program crashes. When I import the file using "file open- foreign data as workfile-" the program crashes also. Opening excel, selecting everything and cut and paste works. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, maybe it is due to the peculiar excel file (irregular dated) or maybe a bug?

great new version by the way.

Definitely a bug. Will get our Excel import guys to take a look. Thanks for letting us know, and sending the file.

Out of interest, could you tell us where that Excel file came from? It isn't a standard Excel file...

What's going on is that your Excel file does not conform to the Excel file specification and Excel is dealing with this more defensively than we are.

Note that if you load the file into Excel and resave it immediately, then the new file saved by Excel does read into EViews (because Excel fixes up the error).

What is causing the problem is that there is a DIMENSIONS record in each worksheet of an Excel file which describes the range of cells that occur in the worksheet. Your DIMENSIONS record says that your worksheet only has data in the first nine columns, while in fact it has data in the first thirteen columns. Our code presumes that we can trust the DIMENSIONS record, while Excel must ignore it in some way if it is inconsistent with the contents of the file.

As far as I know, the excel file is taken from the website of one of the major central banks, and subsequently enlarged by my co-author.
And I can confirm that opening the file in excel and immedeately saving it, indeed solves the problem. That is, I can drag and drop it into Eviews.
Thanks for the rapid response.