On Fri, 11 Mar 2011, Leon Unger wrote: > recently I tried to read in several series via odbc including one dummy series and I forgot to change its entries > from "No" and "YES" to "0" and "1". > However, SQL retrieved for all series the correct number of observations. BUT ALL SERIES were corrupted. > That's why two thoughts come up: > > 1) I know from importing STATA files that GRETL changes string entries to number entries. Does GRETL use > information > provided by the STATA file, or does it this job by itself? If yes, would it be possible to add this functionality > to the odbc read in process? > > 2) If one has always to provide numerical entries and e.g. one series is not correcltly specified then actually > only this series should be corrupted. Of course everything is doable with enough time and resources. I also agree that automagic conversion of stuff coming from an ODBC connection would be very cool. However, the development of gretl is something that very few people do in their spare time. I don't mean to be rude, but asking the user to put a little extra care in formulating an SQL query doesn't sound unreasonable to me (especially considering that the user did not have to pay a single penny for the program).