The process of entering, reading, editing, manipulating, and generating data forms the foundation of most data analyses. Accordingly, much of your time in EViews will probably be spent working with data. EViews provides you with a sophisticated set of data manipulation tools that make these tasks as simple and straightforward as possible.

This chapter describes the fundamentals of working with data in EViews. There are three cornerstones of data handling in EViews: the two most common data objects, series and groups, and the use of samples which define the set of observations in the workfile that we wish to use in analysis.

We begin our discussion of data handling with a brief description of series, groups, and samples, and then discuss the use of these objects in basic input, output, and editing of data. Lastly, we describe the basics of frequency conversion.

In “Working with Data”, we discuss the basics of EViews’ powerful language for generating and manipulating the data held in series and groups. Subsequent chapters describe additional techniques and objects for working with data.