Adding new cross-sections to a dated panel

[berten]

I have a dated panel for 51 cross-sections and 13 periods. I would like to add 20 more cross-sections, for which I have data in excel. This sounds trivial, but when I try to increase the cross-section ID series, EViews doesn't let me do that. How can I include these additional cross-sections? Thanks very much.

[EViews Gareth]

If you use File->Import-Import From File, to import the Excel file, EViews should detect the panel nature of the incoming data, and the panel nature of the current workfile, and handle it automatically.

[berten]

Thanks, I will try this. I have a different question as well. To calculate the normalized values of a variable, should I simply use @cnorm(x)? Would there be additional specifications for panel data? Thank you.

[EViews Gareth]

Define "normalized".

[berten]

I am also trying to figure out what normalized means in this context. I am replicating the results of a study which used an average of 12 normalized individual components to create an index. I attached one of these components. Their results lie between 0 and 1, mostly around 0.5 and 0.7. I assume this is what excel function norm.dist does. One concern is which mean and standard deviation is taken, is it for each country, or for all countries as a whole? We need the index to be comparable across countries.
I tried the above EViews command and it didn't work. It returned only 1 for each data point. How else can I do it?
Thanks.

[EViews Gareth]

There is no command to normalize. Just take off the mean and divide by the stdev.

[berten]

Sure, but doing that gives values greater than 1.