Samples are an important tool for restricting the set of observations used by EViews when performing calculations. You may, for example, set an estimation sample to restrict the observations used in a regression to only include females, or to only use the observations with dates between 1990 and 2003. An important advantage to working with samples is that the exclusion of observations is temporary, and may be reset simply by providing a new sample specification. Note also that even as they are excluded from calculations, out-of-sample observations still exist, and are used for lag processing.

There may be times, however, when you wish to drop or remove observations from a workfile page. For example, if you have daily data on stock trades and want lags to skip holidays, you must permanently remove holidays from the workfile. Similarly, if the focus of your analysis is on female labor force participation, you may wish to subset your workfile by excluding all males. Contracting the workfile in this fashion both reduces the size of the workfile and makes it easier to work with, since you no longer have to remember to set all samples to exclude males.

To contract a workfile page in place, you should click on the Proc button on the workfile toolbar and select Contract Current Page..., or select Proc/Contract Current Page... from the main menu.

EViews will open the Workfile Contract dialog prompting you to input a valid sample specification. Simply enter a sample specification and EViews will drop all observations in the current page that do not meet the specified criteria. Here, we drop all observations where the ID series is greater than 7 or where K lies between 100 and 200 (inclusive).

We emphasize that the workfile contraction occurs in place so that the existing workfile page will no longer exist. If you wish to keep the original page, you should make a copy of the page, or save it to disk.