I am talking about adding the values of a qualitative variable, e.g. country codes, as labels.

As an example from my megacity research, imagine a scatter plot of carbon footprint (y-axis) vs city population (x-axis). In such a plot, it would be very useful if the data points were labeled with the megacity name.

So I am suggesting that two separate improvements be considered for gretl:

(1) Add the capability of handling qualitative (i.e. text) variables, something that is sorely missing right now. I have to manually delete columns containing text from Excel files that I want to open in gretl, which is inconvenient. If anything else, gretl could ignore such columns, not give an error and refuse to open such a file.

(2) Add the capability of adding a qualitative variable as labels of the points of a scatter plot.

Many thanks to all for your thoughts,

John

On Wed, Jun 1, 2022 at 1:00 AM <gretl-users-request@gretlml.univpm.it> wrote:

Am 31.05.2022 um 00:19 schrieb John Paravantis:
> If I may get back to my suggestion, I understand that it may be possible
> to add data labels via commands, but it would appear to me that it would
> not be too difficult to add an option of selecting the values of a
> variable as labels, since the option of adding labels to individual
> points is already built in in the edit dialog of a scatter plot.

John, let me ask the more fundamental question, why would one want the
values as labels? I mean in a scatter plot the values are on the axes
and the location of the data point communicates those values already.
OK, sometimes one wants to see the exact digits and then a kind of
mouse-over tooltip effect is nice. But really printing/displaying the
values right now does not sound to me like a natural GUI feature.

cheers
sven