st: Problem importing data

["Ted Lundgren" <odovakar@spray.se>]

Hi all,

I am new to Stata (have been using Eviews earlier), and despite this excellent forum I'm still having trouble getting my panel data right. I have a "normal" panel so to speak, with "Country" in the first column, "Year" in the second, and then the variables. When I try to get the data into Stata from Excel by either Stattransfer or Copy/Paste, "Country" is all the time being treated as a string variable, no matter what I do. Therefore, the panel can't be estimated, i.e. I am getting an error message. "Year" is also being treated as 'Int'. What am I  doing wrong?