[Gretl-devel] Improving Microdata Handling

Dear Gretl Team, Lately, I started to study about microdata here in Brazil. I confess this is a whole new field in eco- nometrics for me. Talking to another Brazilian econometricians I rea- lized that we have basically three databases about our population (all of them provided by the IBGE - The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics): Censo (Population Census) PNAD (National Household Sample Survey) POF (Consumer Expenditure Survey) I also realized that the great majority of the re- searchers (not only econometricians, but also sta- tisticians, pharmacologists, sociologists, etc.) uses SPSS, Stata and SAS for data handling and poste- rior analisys. As a Gretl community (passionate!) member :-), I started ask to myself: "Why not with Gretl?" Due to this fact, I started to think about ways to improve Gretl in order to gain a wider audience among these potential users The first step I am taking is to convert these da- tasets into Gretl's native dataset. Hopefully, in a couple of days I will start to report the first results :-) Finally, I would like to suggest some features that, in my humble opinion, could improve Gretl (the first two more directly related to microdata): (1) Put string tables in the Icon View window; (2) Allow a better fomating for the codebook (e.g. enabling HTML or something like this); (3) Allow description string for the scalars; (4) Put variable lists in the Icon View window. Many thanks in advance, Henrique Andrade* *