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