EViews objects (series, groups, equations, and so on) display their view and (sometimes) procedure output in the form of graphs, tables, and text. You may, for example, display the descriptive statistics of a set of series, or the regression output from an equation as a table, or the impulse responses from a VAR as a graph. We will term these displays object views.

While object views may be customized in a variety of ways, they are generally transitory; when you close the object and subsequently redisplay or switch between views, many of the customized settings are lost. And in cases where the views are dynamic, the view is regenerated automatically when the underlying object or the active sample changes, resulting in the loss of any custom settings.

Fortunately, you may preserve the current object view, along with any customization, so that it does not change when the object changes. We refer to this action as freezing the view. Freezing a view will create a new output object containing a “snapshot” of the current contents of the view window. The type of object created when you freeze a view depends on the original view—freezing a graphical view creates a graph object, freezing a tabular view creates a table object, and freezing a text view creates a text object.

Graph, table, and text objects form the basis of presentation output, and EViews provides sophisticated tools for customizing the appearance of these objects. EViews also offers a spool object which allows you to manage collections of output objects. Spool objects may be used for creating a log of the output created during a project or an EViews session, or for gathering together graph, table, and text output for a presentation.

The following sections describe the use of graph objects, table objects, and spool objects in greater detail, showing how you may use these objects to form presentation output: