G7: New for 2015

Work in 2015 provided new features, improvements to existing features, and a variety of bug fixes. The most important improvements and new capabilities provided in the G7 software are these:

  • Improved Documentation: The G7 documentation was revised heavily in 2012 and has been updated again in 2015, with new Help files, Users’ Guide, Reference Manual, Tutorial, and other documentation. Companion documents in HTML and PDF formats also were updated. In particular, recent software improvements and extensions have been documented, and cross reference hyperlinks have been added to the Reference Manual.

  • Excel Interface Improvements:

    1. Introduced ability to read a range of dates with the xl read command, and then to recover the dates and components with keywords and to read a corresponding range of data with possibly non-contiguous dates. The set of dates are stored in Excel date format, where a single date may be recovered with the %xldate keyword. The same may be recovered in G7 date format with %xlgdate, or the date components may be recovered as %xlyear, %xlquarter, %xlmonth, and %xlday.

    2. Introduced corresponding xl setfrequency command to clarify the intended frequency of the dates read with the xl read command.

    3. Made xl write command print floating point values or integers to the spreadsheet when numbers are specified as text. Previously, numbers were written as strings, though strings still can be forced with “’<number>”.

  • Graphical Interface Improvements:

    1. Added Run-To-Here F11 shortcut in G7 editor.

    2. Added keywords to recover main window and editor window color and font settings.

    3. Added commands to specify main window and editor window color and font settings.

    4. Added Close (Esc) to gridtype menu.

    5. Began revisions of BankOpen GUI.

  • Miscellaneous Improvements:

    1. Added setveclag command to get|set number of lags for a vector in the default vam file.

    2. Added ‘c|r’ option to the coef command to divide columns (default) | rows by corresponding elements the given vector.

    3. Began work to allow regressions equations to be saved in G7 equation format with the “gf” option with the save command. Change regression coefficient printing to save files to avoid “+-” sequences with negative parameter values.

    4. Added an optional numerical argument for the pause command to wait for the specified number of seconds before continuing.

    5. Add check to the mcopy command to ensure that source bank frequency matches destination bank frequency and that both match fdates frequency or specified date range frequency.

    6. When addprint is off, do not print “add <filename>” statements to screen.

  • An Abridged Listing of Bug Fixes:

    1. Added sanity checks to reading of g.ini file and improved default values.

    2. Improved reading of g.cfg, and eliminated infinite loop when valid g.cfg file is not found.

    3. Fixed memory problems related to series titles in graph routine.

    4. Fixed buffer overflow problem with gtf-gti and long titles that appeared when printing data to file.

    5. Fixed bad printing of graph series names.

    6. Fixed error message in showcmd.

    7. Consecutive views of packed matrices in the show window could fail to display changes made to the data by pmatin; forced storage of loaded vector at top of pmatin, as this will force all subsequent commands to reload data and thus should fix the problem.

    8. Fixed bugs in the show and ras commands.

    9. Fixed up rs ctrlmatrows command.

    10. Fixed problems affecting xl freeze and similar commands, where changes were not made to the intended worksheet.

    11. Fixed problems in xl vecwrite.

    12. Revised coef command code to avoid numerical problems.

Improvements also were made to the companion software Compare.

  • Compare:

    1. Added intelligent search for .pmx file locations for packed matrices. Improved error handling for matrix listing.

    2. Improved control of printing zeros with the \nzr command when multiple banks are loaded, and fix problems with nzr when printing to .xls files.

    3. Improved .in config file reading to allow “..\filename” specification, etc.

    4. Added checks, error messages, and error handling to sort routines, particularly to the maximum number of sectors to be sorted.