G7: New for 2016

Work in 2016 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 2016, 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. Extend xl font command to allow specification of system fonts, to control numerical separators (e.g. ‘,’) and to provide control of text wrapping.

    2. Extend xl font command to allow specification of general, number, currency, accounting, date, short date, long date, time, percentage, fraction, scientific, text, off, or custom settings.

    3. Add xl row height command to set row height.

    4. Improve function of reading dates and corresponding data with xl read command.

  • Graphical Interface Improvements:

    1. Allow display of data with the show command when title files are missing. Allow longer abreviated titles (up to 50 characters); auto-adjust row|column widths for longer abreviated titles. Show full row|column title as Hint when abreviated row|column title is clicked. Allow show command to substitute row|column titles from another file. When opening show to a specified cell, select the cell so that pressing an arrow key starts navigation from the specified location.

    2. Keep focus on G7 Editor window Find and Replace dialog boxes after execution to ease subsequent searches. When Editor is in focus and F3 is pressed, if a match is found then do not shift focus to Find GUI.

    3. Add Close All Banks and Assign Data Banks buttons to the Currently Assigned Banks GUI.

    4. Close the Look window when the associated bank is closed.

  • Miscellaneous Improvements:

    1. Increased maximum dimensions of resector command keys to 2,500 rows and 20 columns (from 1,500 rows and 10 columns).

    2. Change syntax of rs aggmatrix command to allow operations on rectangular matrices. In rs aggmatrix and rs aggmatrows, allow key dimensions to exceed matrix dimensions (i.e. skip excessive index values).

    3. Make type (<expression>) print the expression before printing the data.

    4. In G7 scripts, in some cases allow strings to be expanded and other text within %{}.

  • An Abridged Listing of Bug Fixes:

    1. Eliminate numerical problems in coef and @bmk(,,g) routines.

    2. Fix memory problems in @bmk(), load, and pmload.

    3. Modify changeDir() to fix trouble that appeared in wsb.

    4. Add error checking in data command.

    5. Improve dates check in xl routines. In xl read, allow ‘“xldates”’ as well as ‘xldates’. Fixed various problems with reading an array of Excel dates. Fix problem with xl setfrequency.

    6. Fix search for existence of series when macro bank is not linked to vam bank (affecting %exists()).

    7. Close title file after reading by show command.

    8. In wsreset, close groups.bin file and reopen in new directory.

    9. Fix problem with specified target directory|file in wsreset.

    10. Make rs commands robust and improve error messages. Fix bug that required number-of-sectors specifications in the rs config file to exceed the actual number of sectors.

    11. Fix broken rs aggmatrix routine.

    12. In type command, correct problem with check of the second tdate that allowed buffer overrun.

    13. Improve checking of fdates range vs vam bank date range.

    14. Fix bug in @yoy().

    15. Eliminated unnecessary save prompt in G7 Config GUI.

    16. Fix bug in vc command where (vc vector_x = vector_y / scalar * 100) failed when size(x) > size(y).

Improvements also were made to the companion software Compare.

  • Compare:

    1. Print matrix listing titles when printing to Excel documents.

    2. Automatically set precision to zero when printing integers to Excel documents.

    3. Intelligently call integer/float/string printing function when printing dates to Excel file. Note that Compare currently does not print dates in Excel date format.

    4. Turn off subtitles when no text is given in the \subti command.