Stata has a variety of flexible commands for graphing in two dimensions; however, it has few options for graphing in three dimensions. The user-written surface command by Adrian Mander, available from SSC, attempts to fill this gap, providing both 3D wire-frame plots and dropline plots. However,...

As with most programming languages, there can be multiple ways to do a task in Stata. Using modern CPUs with adequate memory, most Stata data processing commands run so quickly on small- or moderate-sized data sets that it is impossible to tell whether one command performs more efficiently than...