The RATS Software Forum

I have a very urgent problem in relation to opening an xls file in Rats 7.3.

When I try and open my data the program crashes. I have attached both the program code and my dataset file.

The data is organized in rows, running annually from 1971 to 2011. I have remembered to save my excel file as a "97-2003" excel file so that it should be compatible with WinRats 7.3 which I'm currently using. The problem concerns the beginning of the code:

calender(a) 1971:1
allocate 2011:1
open data Dataset3.xlsx
data(format=xls,org=rows,sheet="Data") / FSYD_F_R FSYD_NF_R FSYD_HI_R FSYD_MANFH_R FSAYA_MANFH_R FWYAA_MANFH_R $
YD_MANFH_R YAA_MANFH_R E_MANFH_R FW_MANFH_R RW_MANFH_R TW_MANFH_R PGNDI PHK_PGNDI IWBZ $
LYD_MANFH_R LYAA_MANFH_R LE_MANFH_R LTW_MANFH_R LPGNDI LPHK_PGNDI


I just can't see why the program crashes when I try and open the data. When I hit "enter" over every line, under "Data - Show Series Window", I can see that it looks like the program is having problem with my dates. The series window shows the the numbers 4294936501:01 429493650 under dates. This makes me think that the program cannot read that the data are between 1971 and 2011. And then when I hit enter past the last line, the program crashes.

I know that my variable names are long and that I use the symbol "_" in the names. But looking at the User Guide that shouldn't be a problem. Also I have made sure that it only uses the first sheet from the excel file.

Please help.

Whatever was the problem, that was fixed with RATS v8. If you save it to an even earlier version of Excel (5.0), you won't lose anything, and it appears that it will read properly. Alternatively, you can just save that top sheet that you actually read.

The later versions of the Excel format save all the string information from the entire file in a (rather ugly) string block, so we have to parse through all of that even if most of it will be ignored. Between 7.3 and 8.0, we fixed several problems that come up in files with quite a bit of text information.