EViews.com

I apologize if this is a question with a simple answer or has already been asked.

But I'm trying to import data from an Excel 2007 (*.xlsx) file into an Eviews 7 workfile. The data has a transposed structure (i.e. with series names in the rows of the first column instead of along the first row).

I can't find any option for the import command similar to "t" as in read(b2,t) that I used when reading older versions of Excel files.

Am I missing something simple?

It doesn't exist. The only way to read transposed data is with the read command, and as you point out, the read command does not support .XLSX

How about transposing your data in Excel first?

The data is transposed in Excel because we have 1500+ variables with annual data over 35 years -- otherwise we'd exceed Excel's 256 column limit.

We'll probably just convert the xlsx files to the old xls format and use the read command.

A transpose option in the import command would be a nice feature in future versions of Eviews.

It is actually quite tricky to do, but we get requests for it so often, we'll probably allocate some resources to it. Maybe only for Excel files though.

The xlsx file format supports up to 65536 columns and 1048576 rows. It should be quite easy to handle a 1500+ by 35 dataset.

Thanks tchaithonov.

I've been running my Excel 2007 in compatibility mode, which only has columns from A to IV (i.e. 256 columns). But when opening an .xlsx file, I now see that the columns range from A to XFD (i.e. 16,384 columns).

So no need to transpose my data anymore!