The top level interface elements in Betahat are the pull down menus and a set of 5 tabs.  

Spreadsheet Tab

  As you can see, the spreadsheet tab displays the data read into the program.  If a person uses the menu interface, this is where data-oriented tasks are conducted.  The user can view and edit the data, perform transformations, change the periodicity, launch the Census X-11 seasonal decomposition routines, and a variety of other tasks.  Most all of these features are also available using the command mode interface described later.  Notice also the "Edit with Excel" checkbox.  If you have Excel installed on your machine and select this box then the Excel spreadsheet will become embedded inside Betahat, and you can use all of Excels' editing ability to modify your data.

Econometric Tab

If a person uses the menu interface, this is where econometric tasks are conducted.  This is the basic econometric worksheet where individual equations can be specified, estimated, simulated or combined into systems.  Other forms and menus appear for more user input depending on the task.

The screen shot below shows the same tab as above, but with a different option turned on that allows a linear regression equation to be specified by entering the formulas to use as independent and dependent variables, such as "LOG(Y) CONSTANT LOG(X)" to regress the log of Y on a constant and the log of X.

As an example of a form appearing to help the user specify a task, this is the form that will appear if the user selects the Simulate button.

Command Mode Tab

As we've described elsewhere, Betahat has a command mode interface and a menu interface.  The command mode interface consists of an editor where the commands are entered (or read in from file), an Execute Commands button to start the execution, and a Halt Execution button, which is seldom used, and a Message Window.  The Message Window is used to provide feedback to the user.  The feedback may describe syntax errors or report a computational problem, such as a non-invertible matrix.

Results Tab

The editor in the Results tab is where most users access the output of the estimation and simulation routines.  The results are placed in an editor so that you can edit them however you would like.  The only results that are not placed here are the saved residuals and predicted values from estimation, which are saved in the spreadsheet so you can perform further computation on them.  The tables of data from the Census X-11 routines are placed both in the spreadsheet and in the editor in the results tab.

Graphics Tab

A variety of graphs can be generated using Betahat.

View Sim Tab

Simulations can be compared in a spreadsheet or graph on the View Sim tab.