The problem of handling Roman numerals in Stata is used to illustrate issues arising in the handling of classification codes in character string form and their numeric equivalents. The solutions include Stata programs and Mata func- tions for conversion from numeric to string and from string to...

Many problems in data management center on relating values to values in other observations, either within a dataset as a whole or within groups such as panels. This column reviews some basic Stata techniques helpful for such tasks, including the use of subscripts, summarize, by:, sum(), cond(),...

This article introduces a new Stata command, labcenswdi, to automatically manage databases that provide variable descriptions on the second row in a dataset. While renaming all variables and converting them from string to numeric, labcenswdi automatically manages the variable descriptions...

I provide a new programming tool, cmpute, to manage conveniently the creation of a new variable or the replacement of an existing variable interactively or within a Stata program. Copyright 2013 by StataCorp LP.

In this article, I review An Introduction to Stata for Health Researchers, Fourth Edition, by Svend Juul and Morten Frydenberg (2014 [Stata Press]). Copyright 2014 by StataCorp LP.

fxrates is a command to import historical U.S. exchange rate data from the Federal Reserve and to calculate the daily change of the exchange rates. Because many cross-country datasets use different spellings and conventions for country names, we also introduce a second command, countrynames, to...

Biographical data gathered in surveys are often stored in spell format, allowing for overlaps between spell states. On the one hand, these kind of data provide useful information for researchers. On the other hand, the data structure is often complex and not easy to handle. The newspell program...

A standard task in data management is producing a list of variable names showing which variables have specific properties, such as being of string type, or having value labels attached, or having a date format. A first-principles strategy is to loop over variables, checking one by one which have...

Spells in time series (and more generally in any kind of one-dimensional series) may be defined as sequences of observations that are homogeneous in some sense. For example, a categorical variable may remain in the same state, or values of a measured variable may satisfy the same true-false...

This article reviews The Workflow of Data Analysis Using Stata, by J. Scott Long.