Exporting time series data to excel

[Steve Mikos]

I've always used the outreg2 command to export cross-sectional data to excl. When I try to export my time series data it shows up in text formal instead of excel. My command was:

outreg2 using regresults, replace excel dec(3)

Thank you.

[William Lisowski]

I don't think you've exported any sort of data to Excel using outreg2 - it exports regression results.

[Steve Mikos]

I'm sorry staring at my computer screen too much today. I meant to say results.

[William Lisowski]

When I ran your outreg2 command, it created two files in my working directory - regresults.txt and regresults.xml. When I use Excel to open regresults.xml I see a nicely-formatted results table.

[Steve Mikos]

It must be my computer. When I opened the .xml it actually opened a tab to the internet with some odd looking code. I just copied my table from notepad. Thank you for your response.

[William Lisowski]

I think you missed the inadvertent subtlety of my wording "use Excel to open regresults.xml" by which I meant "from the Excel File menu, select Open, and in the dialog box that appears, locate and select the regresults.xml file, then click the Open button."

XML is a very general-purpose format so it is not surprising that if you clicked on the file your computer used some app other than Excel as the default with which to open it.

On my Mac, in the Finder I can locate regresults.xml and right-click on it, and in the pop-up contextual menu select Open In ... and from the list of applications, select Microsoft Excel.