Hi, in the dialog "gretl plot controls" one can specify a text file with date pairs to get a shaded area/bar in the plot. Now that gretl switched to supporting ISO date format, I think it should allow it here as well, which doesn't currently work (only ":" is allowed as separator, e.g. 2009:11 instead of 2009-11). And BTW: At least on Windows it seems that the file must have a .txt ending to be selectable. I find this overly restrictive, especially on Unix (where I haven't checked, however). thanks, sven