Hi again, as you will have guessed, I'm juggling around some panel datasets at the moment. (BTW, the handling overall has become very nice in recent years, thanks to string-valued series, refinements in panel time setting, and join, etc.) I tried the recipe from the guide described under "Panel data marker strings" in chapter 4. Instead of the given line <genr markers = "%s:%d", marker, year> I tried a more compact thing, replacing the "year" series with the formula "1989+time" (where "time" exists already). This produced no error, but gave rubbish output in the new markers. I guess a formula expression is not allowed there, but then I guess it should be intercepted somehow. (The recipe as given worked OK.) thanks sven