Chapter 18. Optional Ending

EViews devotes an entire menu to setting a myriad of Options. A little bit of one-time customization makes EViews a lot more comfortable, and detailed customization can really speed along a big project.

We’ll explore options in three levels of detail, starting in this section with what you absolutely have to know. The next section gives you our personal recommendations for changing set-

tings. The final section of the chapter walks through all the other important options.

Recapitulation note: Parts of the discussion here repeat advice given in earlier chapters.

Required Options

If it’s required, then it really isn’t an option—is it? That’s the message of this little subsection. Many users live fulfilled and truly happy lives without ever messing with the Options menu. This is okay. EViews’ designers have chosen very nice defaults for the options. Feel free to leave them as they are.

Option-al Recommendations

Here’s how you should reset your options. Trust me. We’ll talk about why later.

These options can be found under the General Options... menu item.

404—Chapter 18. Optional Ending

Window Behavior

In the Environment/Window behavior dialog, under Warn on close uncheck

Series-Matrices-Coeffi- cients, Groups, TablesGraphs, and Equation- Sys-VAR-Pool-Model.

Under Allow only one untitled uncheck everything to cut down on unnecessary alert boxes.

Alpha Truncation

In the Series and

Alphas/Alpha truncation dialog, enter a large number in the

Maximum number of characters per observation field. Try 256, or even 1,000

Option-al Recommendations—405

Workfile Storage Defaults

In the Data storage/Workfile Save dialog, check Use compression. One exception—don’t do this if you need to share workfiles with someone using an older (before 5.0) version of EViews. Uncheck

Prompt on each Save.

Date Representation

If you’re American, which includes Canadian for the very limited purpose of this sentence, skip this paragraph. Americans write dates Month/Day/Year. Most of the world prefers the order Day/Month/Year. If you operate in the latter area, click the

Day/Month/Year radio button.