This handbook gives a detailed introduction to the Time Series Database System MAXDATA, which offers a very simple and convenient handling of voluminous numerical databases on a personal computer. It may be regarded as a special education and teaching instrument for the management and evaluation of empirical data and will teach the reader how to do empirical work without any effort. The handbook aims to give the reader a precise idea of the creation, management, documentation and evaluation of voluminous numerical databases on a microcomputer and gives some tips for managing individual numerical databases, but also for having direct access to official national and international economic offline databases. We believe that you will not regret your decision to use MAXDATA in your day-to-day work with statistical data, analyses, graphics, reports etc. Our aim was to design a software product which solves all the major problems associated with professional, decentralized data processing, whilst meeting the highest user requirements for user-friendliness and performance. We hope we have succeeded; positive user response appear to prove our point. Why MAXDATA was created MAXDATA was born of frustration at the multiplicity of computer programs flooding the software market, many of which offer extremely high performance (almost to the point of confusion) but which can generally only be used by computer specialists or those who have undergone a long period of training.