All this is with the Windows snapshot from Aug 18th. I have read in with 'join' a variable holding date strings, and gretl does what the manual says (p.18 in the a4-guide of July 2013): "if a given column contains character data only, consecutive numeric codes are substituted for the strings," but right now I haven't seen the following, which I know had been true formerly: " and once the import is complete a table is printed showing the correspondence between the strings and the codes." Instead gretl uses the strings directly in the "show values" dialog, which is nice, but the correspondence isn't obvious anymore. BTW, on p.19 the guide says about date strings: "For monthly data: a 4-digit year, followed by a period or a colon, followed by a two-digit month. Examples: 1997.01, 2002:10." which would contradict the ISO format as the new preferred way. So is that still true? And then a totally different issue about invocation of Python via "foreign": My path to Python in gretl's preferences was not ok, but I only got a pretty generic error message from the OS, nothing from gretl. So it took me a while to troubleshoot this, maybe it's possible to add some informative error message. Thanks, sven