now in — Tips

Most of us first encountered STATA in an Econometrics class, where we were given cleaned datasets and detailed do-files. Using STATA was merely a mechanical process of cutting and pasting. The goal of these computer sessions was to interpret regression results, rather than to learn STATA.

So when I wrote my first quantitative essay with original data, I did all the analysis interactively without using do-files. It was not until my first RA job that I realized all the time I spent typing cautiously on the STATA command window (knowing there is no ‘undo’ in STATA) was utterly inefficient. Looking back, I even admit that my first ever merge was done semi-manually. Weeks of tedious manual work could have been done in just one day, if I had known how to use STATA.

Here are some very helpful STATA tutorial pages from which I learned how to use STATA properly. I hope these links can help you avoid a detour like the one I took.

Introduction to STATA by Germán Rodríguez at Princeton: a nice overview of the basics in STATA.
University of Wisconsin SSCC STATA Tutorials:
- Data Wrangling in STATA: a 9-part progression to grasp the very basics of STATA.
- STATA Programming Essentials: learning the basic building blocks (macros, loops) of programming in STATA.
- STATA Programming Tools: more advanced programming tools from double quotes to defining your own programs.
Outputting Tables: very easily yet flexible ways to output your summary statistics and regression outputs.
Examples of STATA graphs: - Graph Library, UCLA - Types of graph, official STATA support - Graphs for survey data, Survey Design and Analysis Services - Some sophisticated user-written graphs, Survey Design and Analysis Services

2020-05-28 Useful links for beginners

Notepad++ and STATA integration:

Download the latest Notepad++ and install it.

Set up hot keys to pass code from Notepad++ to STATA (like Ctrl-D in STATA’s editor).

Follow this instruction by Friedrich Huebler. Or,
In the case where you get your new version of STATA before Huebler gets to update his files (for STATA 12, there was a 2-month lag), then knowing how to create your own ‘rundo’ programs through AutoIt will solve your problem. See this instruction by Keith Kranker for details.

Set up syntax highlighting: it makes writing do-file more fun and reading it much easier. Below is a snapshot of how it looks. I suggest you download a ready-made syntax file (e.g., this one) and modify it according to your own liking.

Here are the steps:

Save the syntax highlighting file in .xml format.

In Notepad++, click on ‘Language’ on your toolbar, and select ‘Define your language’. In the pop-up window, click on ‘Import’ and navigate to the directory where you saved the xml file. You should see ‘Import successful’.

You can customize all the options to assign colors of your choice to different specifications. Either way, remember to save it and give it a name, say ‘STATA syntax’.

Restart Notepad++, and open a do file.

Go to the ‘Language’ option and click on ‘STATA syntax’, or whatever name you used.

From now on, any do-file you open with Notepad++ will have Stata syntax highlighting. You can also set it as your default do-file editor, if you wish.

You could also setup auto-completion and/or spell-check, but I think they’re a bit of an overkill (still, see Kranker’s page for more details).

Ying Chen

Ying Chen

How is Notepad++ better than STATA’s default do-file editor?

Here are some functions that I find useful (see this page for a full list of nice functions and corresponding hot keys):

Notepad++ and STATA integration:

Here are the steps: