Re: [Gretl-devel] Report

I would like to report on the feedback that I received during the two 42 hr. applied econometrics with gretl trainings that I have given over the last 3 weeks. In general, the students (almost all of whom were professionals from the government) did very much enjoy learning and using gretl. They also understood the development paradigm and how it is possible that gretl is free yet as good as various commercial programs. I am sure that in the future they will be using gretl extensively, although they will continue to use other programs mainly SPSS, Stata and Eviews. There were also 3 issues that they raised: 1)- Some people were very much interested in the principal components functionality but they were ultimately disappointed. Apparently they need to use this functionality (in SPSS) to create various indexes using a large number of series. Still, I guess this can be considered more like a statistical functionality than an econometric one, no?

2)- Some students suggested (and all others agreed) that it would be very useful to have a predict command, which will provide predicted values as well as slopes (given Xs) for various nonlinear models such as polynomial regressions, logit, probit etc. I think this could be nice to have as a command as well as a GUI entry next to the forecast item. Maybe a small goodie to consider for the 2.0 release? They said Stata has this.

3)- One student told that the "save to session as icon" and the "save as icon and close" items act in a confusing manner. The suggestion was that: a)- Once the user selects "save to session as icon", this entry becomes ghosted so that it cannot be selected again to get an unnecessary error message.

b)- If the "save to session as icon" is already chosen, the "save as icon and close" does not generate an error message but just close the model window, which is already saved.