Hi, Can't read date column into gretl. I've read the manual, formatted the column as gretl would expect (file is attached). But when I want to read the file I receive and error message saying "can't make sense of the extra bit". It seems, gretl sees the internal excel date value which is a number representing the date value as the number of days since 1/1/1900 (A serial number 1 represents 1/1/1900 internally in Excel). Tried many variations with no luck. Assuming this might be due to local regional settings (which were Turkish) having different date formats, I switched to English (USA) settings and tried, but did not work. Any ideas ? Thanks, Bulent Erdemir

Bulent, I changed the format of column A. I used mmm-yy and it works fine. Best, R 2012/4/4 Bulent Erdemir <bulente(a)gmail.com&gt; > Hi, > > Can't read date column into gretl. I've read the manual, formatted the > column as gretl would expect (file is attached). But when I want to read > the file I receive and error message saying "can't make sense of the extra > bit". > It seems, gretl sees the internal excel date value which is a number > representing the date value as the number of days since 1/1/1900 (A serial > number 1 represents 1/1/1900 internally in Excel). > Tried many variations with no luck. > > Assuming this might be due to local regional settings (which were > Turkish) having different date formats, I switched to English (USA) > settings and tried, but did not work. > > Any ideas ? > > Thanks, > Bulent Erdemir > > _______________________________________________ > Gretl-users mailing list > Gretl-users(a)lists.wfu.edu > http://lists.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-users > _______________________________________________ Gretl-users mailing list Gretl-users(a)lists.wfu.edu http://lists.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-users

On Wed, 4 Apr 2012, Bulent Erdemir wrote: > Indeed it works. Thank you very much. > > On the other, the documentation says that the format should be yyyy:mm for > monthly date values on page 21 in User Guide. If dates are given as strings, then yyyy:mm is a good format for monthly data (though gretl will recognize a variety of formats). However, your dates are not strings, they are integers (which represent calendar dates in Excel). If the left-most column is reognized as being in a standard Excel date format, then the date-integers will be processed correctly, but YYYY:MM is not a standard Excel date format so the integers are read "raw", in which case they don't make sense as dates. Allin Cottrell _______________________________________________ Gretl-users mailing list Gretl-users(a)lists.wfu.edu http://lists.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-users