All About Excel

Microsoft Excel is still used by many users and this post will quickly go over all of the different ways you can share and move data between EViews and Excel.

Native Excel File Support

EViews offers direct Excel file read and write capability. If you have data in an existing Excel spreadsheet and you wish to use it in an EViews workfile, simply drag and drop the Excel file onto an EViews workfile to start the import (see IMPORT command and Importing Data in our User's Guide) or drop it onto an empty area in the EViews frame window to create a new workfile (see WFOPEN command).

At the end of the import, you also have the option to link the data back to the source spreadsheet. This will allow you to easily refresh the data in the workfile, whenever the source Excel data has changed (see WFREFRESH).

By default, EViews will try to read in objects by column and will look for a single header row for the object names. In addition, EViews can transpose the data before import if your objects are defined in rows instead.

In the other direction, you can save EViews workfiles directly to an Excel file by going to
File –> Save As, then selecting the proper Excel type in the Save as type dropdown (see WFSAVE command and Exporting Data in our User's Guide).

Note: Reading the newer Excel .XLSX file format was added in EViews 7. Saving in .XLSX format was added in EViews 8.

Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)

EViews has many users whose workflow includes repeatedly copying and pasting graphs and tables from EViews into the same Microsoft Office documents every time data or results are updated. We also have users who would like to give their colleagues the ability to adjust the appearance of their graphs and/or tables but without having the source workfile. One possible solution for both sets of users is to use Object Linking and Embedding (OLE).

Object Linking 

Object linking allows you to place your EViews graph or table into a Microsoft document but maintain a link/connection to the series or object in your EViews workfile. When changes are made to the source EViews workfile, those changes can be reflected immediately in the objects within the Microsoft document.