WF1 to CSV and Excel Converter

Most people who get a .wf1 file only want the numbers. Textbooks such as Principles of Econometrics and many university courses ship their data as EViews workfiles, replication packages for economics papers often do the same, and forecasting teams pass workfiles around because EViews is what they use. Without EViews the usual advice is to install gretl or an R package and write some code. This page does it in the browser: choose the file, look at it, press a button.

Excel gets one sheet per workfile page with the observation labels (1990Q1, 2012-01-03, Australia 1971 and so on) in the first column and a series per column, the header row frozen, a Series sheet with each series' display name, description, remarks and statistics, and an About sheet listing the page frequencies and any other objects. NA values become empty cells, so averages and charts in Excel ignore them the way EViews does.

CSV gets the current page as UTF-8 with a byte order mark, so Excel shows accented names correctly, and with the obs column first. That is the shape R's read.csv, pandas.read_csv and Stata's import delimited expect. Panel pages keep one row per cross section and period, with the identifier series EViews uses for the panel as ordinary columns too.

Each export keeps the series names exactly as EViews stores them, in capitals, so scripts written for the original workfile still find their columns. Display names and descriptions do not go into the CSV header, which keeps it easy to read in code; they are in the Series sheet of the Excel file and in the Series list on screen, together with the remarks and source notes the author left in each series' label view.

Big workfiles are fine. A daily page with decades of data and dozens of series converts in a second or two, because the reader runs in a background worker and the CSV is written in pieces. Pages too big for Excel's row limit are flagged, and the CSV always has every observation.

The conversion happens on your device. The .wf1 file is not uploaded, and the CSV or Excel file is handed straight to your browser as a download.

Only stored series are exported. Equations, graphs and tables in the workfile are listed in the About sheet by name, and series EViews saved in a compressed form are named in a note instead of being exported with wrong values.