If you export Brian's file as CSV there are 5 empty columns at the end of the series. If you put names in row 1 for each of these columns and save your XLSX file, it can be read by Gretl. The unnamed 7th column is the first of these columns.
John C Frain 3 Aranleigh Park Rathfarnham Dublin 14 Ireland www.tcd.ie/Economics/staff/frainj/home.html https://jcfrain.wordpress.com/ https://jcfraincv19.wordpress.com/ mailto:[email protected] mailto:[email protected] On Tue, 16 Dec 2025 at 10:01, Brian Revell <[email protected]> wrote: > Many thanks > One still has much to learn. Will try your suggestion to satisfy my > curiosity re xlsx format. Might saving in the old xls format avoid the > problem of ghost cells, though less of a general solution than the line1 > string you suggest. > B > > On Tue, 16 Dec 2025, 08:23 Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti, < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> On 15/12/2025 22:35, Brian Revell wrote: >> >> Thanks for letting me know that. Explains why Gretl in turn was confusing >> me. Might saving it as a CSV file have been less problematic to 2025c. >> Though as I said, uploads of xlsx files to earlier versions of Gretl have >> always been straightforward. >> >> Just for future reference, if you want to have a look at what you >> *really* get inside an xlsx file, here's what you can do: >> >> 1. Rename the file and change its extension to "zip" (eg, I renamed the >> file you sent us to "Brian.zip") >> >> 2. Open the zip file with any application you want; if you're on windows, >> I guess you might as well double-click on it >> >> 3. You'll see a hierarchical structure of files and folders. Go to >> "xl/worksheets" and you'll see a file named "sheet1.xml" >> >> 4. You may open that file with any program that handles text. Notepad, >> Word, whatever. However, I would suggest firefox, that handles the xml >> format quite nicely (the absence of line breaks may be problematic >> otherwise). >> >> 5. Note that each row has a "spans" attribute that tells you how many >> non-empty columns you get. In your case, this number is 12 (I don't know >> why) >> >> 6. If you navigate to row 14, you'll see that the L14 cell contains the >> value "4", which is however marked as a shared string (t="s"). This is >> obviously spurious in this case and you can't expect gretl to figure out >> that you didn't really mean to put something invisible in there. >> >> If you do this, you'll see clearly why the xlsx format is not really >> ideal for storing data: some (most?) of the information it contains is >> invisible to the naked eye, so to speak, and this may cause problems when >> reading its contents. As you suggested, CSV is much better in that respect. >> >> Having said this, I'm wondering whether we can somehow handle cases like >> this via a policy of considering as genuine data columns only the ones that >> have a suitable string on row 1, and ignoring the rest. >> >> >> ------------------------------------------------------- >> Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti >> Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES) >> >> Università Politecnica delle Marche >> (formerly known as Università di Ancona) >> >> [email protected] >> http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti >> ------------------------------------------------------- >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Gretl-users mailing list -- [email protected] >> To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] >> Website: >> https://gretlml.univpm.it/postorius/lists/gretl-users.gretlml.univpm.it/ >> > _______________________________________________ > Gretl-users mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > Website: > https://gretlml.univpm.it/postorius/lists/gretl-users.gretlml.univpm.it/ >
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