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These are comments on my experience with upgrading Metastock from 6.52 EOD to 7.02 EOD.
Bottom line: it went without a (unexpected) hitch.
Horrified initially by some posts on the List, for quite a while I was a kind of reluctant
to do it, but when I decided to proceed, I started it with an extreme caution. Notes
posted by Ron Stockstill, Ton Maas and others encouraged me a lot (thanks!).
A problem I was aware of was that I had a lot of invalid references in my indicators
(have been forced to delete old ones to make room for new. Why this, how to put it
politely, unwise limitation?). Though I was certain that indicators' syntax was
correct, since I used them before. So my plan was to install first 7.02 EOD
into a new directory (actually, it was a different partition) without taking aboard any
old stuff from 6.52. Thus, during the installation I refused to the installer's suggestion
to upgrade my old stuff having got a new, squeaky clean install of 7.02. At that time,
don't ask why, I forgot about existing "import" utilities in Metastock to use if adding
old indicators, explorations, etc. Instead ( it's not a recommendation to follow this path
though it worked, just a description of the way it went by), in Tools/Options/File
locations/Custom indicators, System Tests, Explorations/ I typed in a path to the
directory where my old stuff was kept. Then clicked "OK".
When tried to open Tools/Indicator Builder or others, Metastock protested insisting that I
first should upgrade all that jazz to 7.02. Hard to argue, so I said OK. This is where my
problem started to pop up. For each indicator with disconnected links, Metastock would
open Indicator Editor with warning "No indicator names in the indicator contain this
text". Since I had no intention to fix this, I just clicked "Cancel" exiting the editor.
Then it gave me a window "Do you want to cancel the Indicator Builder Update?". I would
respond with "No". And it kept updating until the next 'invalid' indicator. I repeated
this procedure for Explorations. Finally, I've got new files Ms70form.dta, etc. in old
..\MetaStock directory (mind, it left untouched old Ms65*.* files). Important that all my
indicators and explorations were updated to 7.02 including those with invalid references.
Of course, they still don't work, but at least they are there, and I may return to them
later. The only thing to be done was to move those Ms70*.* files into new ..\MetaStock
directory, and redirect the path in Tools/Options/File locations/Custom indicators, System
Tests, Explorations/ back to new ..\MetaStock directory.
So it seems (sure, a tentative feeling) formulas, templates and layouts were converted
correctly and en masse - no copying, pasting individual items (I don't do system tests
and experts in Metastock). Also, one of my major explorations on about 1000 stocks
produced identical lists of stocks on 6.52 and 7.02 . Important that new 7.02 is faster
than 6.52, indeed. The exploration runs 2 times faster now.
Also, I still can use my old 6.52 with its own non-upgraded to 7.02 indicators, ... . Yep,
for a while I plan to keep and update MetaStock data files separately for 6.52 if any need
to fall back arises.
Hope it will help to other upgraders. Good luck.
Cheers, Vitaly
P.S. Can somebody tell me how to cycle securities when viewing charts not in alphabetic
order of names or symbols, but in the order they are stored in data files ( as seen in
Downloader) ? It drives me crazy, since first I would sort securities in the way I want
(say, first a list of Longs, then Shorts). But I get this. Old 6.52 sees them as they are
in Downloader. Am I dumb with the new program or what?
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