Gretl Manual: Gnu Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library | ||
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gretl offers the idea of a "session" as a way of keeping track of your work and revisiting it later. This is experimental (and at present more likely to be buggy than the rest of the program); I would be interested in hearing people's reactions.
The basic idea is to provide a little iconic space containing various objects pertaining to your current working session (see Figure 3-2). You can add objects (represented by icons) to this space as you go along. If you save the session, these added objects should be available again if you re-open the session later.
If you start gretl and open a data set, then select "Icon view" from the Session menu, you should see the basic default set of icons: these give you quick access to the command script ("Session"), information on the data set (if any), correlation matrix ("Corrmat") and descriptive summary statistics ("Summary"). All of these are activated by double-clicking the relevant icon. The "Data set" icon is a little more complex: double-clicking opens up the data in the built-in spreadsheet, but you can also right-click on the icon for a menu of other actions.
Tip: In many gretl windows, the right mouse button brings up a menu with common tasks.
Two sorts of objects can be added to the Icon View window: models and graphs.
To add a model, first estimate it using the Model menu. Then pull down the File menu in the model window and select "Save to session as icon…" or "Save as icon and close". Simply hitting the S key over the model window is a shortcut to the latter action.
To add a graph, first create it (under the Data menu, "Graph specified vars", or via one of gretl's other graph-generating commands), then choose "Add last graph" from the Session menu or click the little camera button on the toolbar (see the Section called The gretl toolbar in Chapter 2).
Once a model or graph is added its icon should appear in the Icon View window. Double-clicking on the icon redisplays the object, while right-clicking brings up a menu which lets you display or delete the object. This popup menu also gives you the option of editing graphs.
If you create models or graphs that you think you may wish to re-examine later, then before quitting gretl select "Save as…" from the Session menu and give a name under which to save the session. To re-open the session later, either
Start gretl then re-open the session file by going to the "Open" item under the Session menu, or
From the command line, type gretl -r sessionfile, where sessionfile is the name under which the session was saved.