At the heart of the EViews design is the concept of an object. In brief, objects are collections of related information and operations that are bundled together into an easy-to-use unit. Virtually all of your work in EViews will involve using and manipulating various objects.

EViews holds all of its objects in object containers. You can think of object containers as filing cabinets or organizers for the various objects with which you are working. The most important object container in EViews is the workfile, which is described in “Workfile Basics”.

The remainder of this chapter describes basic techniques for working with objects in a workfile. While you may at first find the idea of objects to be a bit foreign, the basic concepts are easy to master and will form the foundation for your work in EViews. But don’t feel that you have to understand all of the concepts the first time through. If you wish, you can begin working with EViews immediately, developing an intuitive understanding of objects and workfiles as you go.

Subsequent chapters will provide a more detailed description of working with the various types of objects and other types of object containers.

Note that the current discussion focuses on interactive methods for working with objects. If you feel more comfortable using commands, “Object and Command Basics”, offers command equivalents for the operations described in this chapter.