Lecture 17 - Eviews software. In this chapter we will discuss: Eviews - introduction; Eviews - getting started; updating; data handling; graphs, tables, and spools; general eviews interface; programming support. | LECTURE 17 NOTES A Quick Walk Through You and I are going to start our conversation by taking a quick walk through some of EViews’ most used features. To have a concrete example to work through, we’re going to take a look at the volume of trade on the New York Stock Exchange. We’ll view the data as a set of numbers on a spreadsheet and as a graph over time. We’ll look at summary statistics such as mean and median together with a histogram. Then we’ll build a simple regression model and use it for forecasting. Workfile: The Basic EViews Document Start up a word processor, and you’re handed a blank page to type on. Start up a spreadsheet program, and a grid of empty rows and columns is provided. Most programs hand you a blank “document” of one sort or another. When you fire up EViews, you get a welcome screen offering you some choices about how you’d like to get started. To get some support before diving into EViews, you can turn your attention to the section on the right, which offers various tutorials and online help. Being impatient to get started, let’s take the quick solution and load an existing workfile. If you’re working on the computer while reading, you may want to load the workfile “nysevolume. wf1” by clicking on the Open an existing EViews workfile button. If you have saved the workfile on your computer, navigate to its location and open it. While word processor documents can start life as a generic blank page, EViews documents— called “workfiles”—include information about the structure of your data and therefore are never generic. Consequently, creating an EViews workfile and entering data takes a couple of minutes, or at least a couple of seconds, of explanation. In the next chapter we’ll go through all the required steps to set up a workfile from scratch. Now that a workfile’s loaded EViews looks like this. Our workfile contains information about quarterly average daily trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). There’s quite a bit of information, with over 400 observations taken across more than a century. The icon indicates a data series stored in the workfile. Viewing an individual series If you double-click on the series VOLUME in the workfile window you’ll get a first peek at the data. Right now we’re looking at the spreadsheet view of the series VOLUME. The spreadsheet view shows the numbers stored in the series. On average in the first quarter of 1888, 159,006 shares were traded on the NYSE. (The numbers for VOLUME were recorded in millions.) Interesting, but perhaps a little outdated for understanding today’s market?
