> Today I'd started to test the new functionality: The "open" > command capacity to get data files from web. It is really great! > > I'd tried these commands: > > open > http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO/downloaddata/INDPRO.xl... If you download the file in question and try opening it in gretl as specified, you get: "This file is not an 'OLE' file -- it may be too old for gretl to read." It's some sort of ancient Microsoft format. (Thanks, St Louis Fed!). The "file" command on Ubuntu 10.04 says: "INDPRO.xls: CDF V2 Document, corrupt: Cannot read summary info" > open > http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO/downloaddata/INDPRO.tx... Sorry, --rowoffset=XX is not available for plain text files, only for spreadsheets. > open > http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO/downloaddata/INDPRO.csv > > But only the last one (.csv) had returned the values. Is there anything > wrong with the others? Noted above. Try, for example, stata ".dta" files available via the web, these should work OK.