Advanced Stata: Programming and Other Techniques to Make Your Life Easier

The course can be divided broadly into three sections:

Data handling and manipulation

Stata has some powerful but simple commands for managing and manipulating data. We cover the commands needed to combine data from different datasets (appending and merging) and to rearrange data from wide format to long format. We will also cover searching for duplicate records, and managing these, reordering the variables in the dataset, generating summary variables and summary datasets.

Export and presentation of results

A general shortcoming of statistical software is the difficulty of producing bespoke and well-formatted results. The output in the Stata results window typically contains more detail than is required, and needs further formatting. Cutting and pasting is tedious when there are many results to present and inefficient when analyses have to be repeated.

It is possible to automatically output well formatted, concise and relevant results from Stata and there are number of ways to do this. Stata has excellent graph capabilities and we show you how to make the most of these. We teach a variety of methods to send the results you require, nicely formatted, to other datasets, to documents and spreadsheets and to text files. This includes the use of commands within Stata, additional user-written Stata commands and some simple programming.

Programming Stata

Data cleaning, data management and the initial stages of many analyses can be repetitive and time consuming. Many of these repetitive tasks can be automated in Stata, which not only speeds up the process but also reduces the chances of making an error. We cover the use of basic programming techniques to assist you in quickly and efficiently carrying out repetitive tasks. We also teach you to write a Stata program to create new Stata commands.

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

Data management

• Generate variables that contain summaries of the data
• Create a summary dataset using collapse
• Navigate a dataset using system variables _n, _N and subscripted variables
• Rearrange a dataset using reshape
• Combine multiple datasets using merge and append
• Identify duplicate observations

Export and presentation of results

• Export data to a spreadsheet
• Create tailor-made publication quality graphs
• Know how to export results using user-written commands: estout
• Be able to write a do-file which exports results using file write
• Be able to write a do-file which exports results to word documents using putdocx
• Be familiar with other commands for accessing and outputting results such as putexcel

Programming

• Understand what macros and scalars are
• Be able to use foreach and forvalues loops
• Understand and use if statements
• Understand how Stata stores estimation results
• Be able to access and use stored estimation results
• Understand how Stata programs work
• Be able to write and use a simple Stata program

None. There will be an opportunity on the last afternoon for students to practice with their own datasets. A certificate of attendance will be provided on completion of the course.