Dbank: Using Microsoft Excel

Overview

Dbank's add-in for Microsoft Excel enables you to access and manipulate virtually every attribute of a time-series (including its data values) stored in a Dbank database from Microsoft Excel. It also exposes Dbank's statistical engine to Excel, which has advanced statistical and forecasting techniques that are not available in the standard release of Microsoft Excel. For example, the add-in enables you to apply the following statistical procedures to a range of data values in an Excel worksheet:

• Standard unit-root statistics, including Phillips (1987) Za and Zt statistics for testing the null-hypothesis of a unit-root.
• The Department of Commerce's recently released X12 seasonal adjustment routine.
• The Hodrick-Prescott (HP), Baxter-King (1999), and recently developed "approximate" ideal Band-Pass filters using frequency domain techniques.
• Numerous smoothing algorithms for estimating long-run trends, including single and double exponential smoothers, and Jerome Friedman's "super" smoother.
• Holt-Winters forecasting techniques.

Dbank's add-in is activated using Excel's Tools | Add-In Menu (a one-time requirement). Please ensure that the entry "Dbank's Time Series Manager" is checked before attempting to invoke any of the functions described below.

The statistical functions in Dbank's add-in are designed to operate either on an Excel range of numeric values or a time-series that resides in a Dbank database rather than Excel. In the latter case, the add-in reads the series from the data base before the function is processed by Excel.

The add-in functions will normally operate on all of the observations in a particular series. However, users can force the functions to operate on a subset of a time-series observations by using the optional "Start_Date" and "End_Date" parameters that appear in every function's argument list (see below).

The functions in the add-in can also be nested. This capability in particular allows you to create very sophisticated reports that are dynamically linked to a time-series database.

Dbank's add-in was written and tested using the versions of Visual Basic for Applications distributed with Excel 97/2000 and XP.