On Wed, 9 Sep 2020, Sven Schreiber wrote: > Hi, as per section 15.2 of the guide it is not supported to enter the > contents of string-valued series manually (in the GUI). > > But I guess sometimes it would be useful to be able at least to edit > those series, or what would be the suggested way to change, say, a > single value (obs) of a string-valued series? Doesn't section 15.3 of the Guide pretty much cover that? Take a look, and if there's something you reckon should be allowed but is not currently allowed, please say.

On Thu, 10 Sep 2020, Sven Schreiber wrote:

> I was wondering how to achieve that in the GUI. I can look at the > string values alright, but when I choose "edit", then I get the > numerical values instead. So I cannot change the spelling of a string > label, for example. (Always in the GUI I mean.) For example from > "U.S." to "USA" or stuff like that. I can envisage it being easy to mess up a string-valued series via the GUI unless the interface is both quite complex and very carefully designed. Think about changing all occurrences of "U.S." to "USA" versus changing the string (and hence the code) for a particular observation (from one already-valid string to another). For the latter operation, if there were a fairly small number of distinct values we could offer a pop-down list to choose from. Otherwise I'm not sure what we'd do. For the former I guess we could also do a pop-down next to a replace-by box, or free-form fields with good error checking? How much demand is there likely to be for this sort of thing? It's obviously doable in principle but would be quite a lot of work.