Migrating To Stata Painlessly!

“Migrating to Stata Painlessly!” is a reduced version of our “Up and Running in Stata” course. The course covers everything from the very basics, in order to get one up and running in Stata, through to an overview of the Stata commands available for preliminary data analysis, data management, importing and exporting data formats and the creation of graphs in Stata.

In contrast to our Up and Running in Stata course however, it does not include specific applied Lab based exercises at the end of each individual session. Despite this, participants are able to replicate in real time the commands being illustrated by the course leader using the data bases provided at the beginning of the course.

This course has been specifically designed for researchers wishing to migrate to Stata from other statistical packages or simply needing to refresh their existing Stata skills. Experience has shown us that individuals without any previous experience of other statistical software packages are likely to find the course somewhat too intensive and would benefit far more from attending our Up and Running in Stata, which offers an applied exercise component at the end of each session during which participants have the opportunity to implement the concepts/techniques discussed in the sessions under the watchful eye of the course tutor.

Working knowledge of other statistical software packages such as R, SPSS o SAS, together with Familiarity with PCs and a working knowledge of English is also required.

SESSION I: INTRODUCTION – GETTING STARTED

1. Stata’s GUI
2. File types in Stata
3. Working interactively in Stata
4. Saving output: the log file
5. Interrupting Stata
6. Loading Stata databases
7. The Log Output File
8. Saving databases in Stata
9. Exiting the software

SESSION II: PRELIMINARY DATA ANALYSIS

1. A preliminary look at the data: describe, summarize commands
2. Abbreviations in Stata
3. Stata’s syntax
4. Summary statistics
5. Statistical Tables: table, tabstat and tabulate commands

SESSION III: DATA MANAGEMENT

1. Renaming variables
2. Selecting or eliminating variables
3. The count command
4. sort command
5. Creating sub-groups: the prefix by
6. Creating new variables: generate
7. Operators in Stata
8. The command assert
9. Missing values in Stata
10. Modifying variables: replace, recode
11. Creating Labels: variable labels and value labels
12. Creating dummy variables

SESSION IV: IMPORTING DATA FROM SPREADSHEETS

1. Import Excel and Export Excel commands
2. The insheet and outsheet commands
3. Reading in Text Data Files
4. Issues to watch out for when importing data
   • Missing values
   • String variables
   • Date variables
5. Redefining missing values
6. destring command
7. tostring command
8. dealing wih “messy” strings

SESSION V: GRAPHICS – A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

1. Stata’s syntax for two way graphs
2. Saving and exporting graphs
3. Useful graph commands
4. Personalizing a graph
5. Stata’s Graph Editor

APPENDIX A

1. Merging data bases
2. do files

APPENDIX B: MORE ADVANCED ISSUES (time permitting)

1. do files
2. Merging data bases
3. e-class and r-class variables
4. collapse command
5. preserve command
6. restore command

SUGGESTED READINGS

• Acock, A. (2018). A Gentle Introduction to Stata. 6th Edition, Stata Press.
• Kohler, Ulrich, & Kreuter, Frauke (2012). Data Analysis Using Stata. 3rd Edition, Stata Press.
• Mitchell, Michael N. (2020). Data Management Using Stata: A Practical Handbook. 2nd Edition, Stata Press.
• Long, J. Scott (2009). The Workflow of Data Analysis Using Stata. Stata Press.

We are currently adding the finishing touches to our 2026 training calendar. We therefore ask you to check our website regularly or contact us at training@tstat.eu should the dates for the course you are interested in not be published yet. You will then be contacted via email as soon as the dates are available.