NetCourse^® 101: Introduction to Stata

Course content

Lecture 1: Introduction

• Filesystem basics
  • Using directories to organize your work
  • The current directory: Summary
  • Dealing with files
  • Filenames in Stata
  • Loading the automobile data
• The basics of Stata
  • How Stata conceptualizes data
  • Stata’s command syntax
  • The minimum set of commands everyone should know
  • Working interactively: Getting organized
  • Working interactively: Interrupting Stata
  • Working interactively: Keeping logs
  • Using the Stata Viewer
• Using search and updating Stata
  • Installing Stata updates over the web
  • Installing new commands over the web: The SJ and the STB
  • Installing new commands over the web: Other sources
  • Installing new commands: Statalist

Lecture 2: Miscellaneous data management topics

• Working with data
  • The data in memory
  • Value labels
  • Formats
  • Other kinds of labels
• Safe computing
• Basic data reporting
• Data manipulation
• Making strings into numerical categorical variables
  • Doing things the long way
  • The second solution
  • The best solution
• Observation subscripts _n and _N
• Memory management

There is an one-week break between Lectures 2 and 3 in this course because we have found the extra time is necessary for discussion.

Lecture 3: Getting data into Stata

• Obtaining data
• The infile command
  • Post-infile processing
  • infile with a data dictionary
• The insheet and outsheet commands
• A note on memory management
• Reading multiple lines per observation
• Reading multiple observations per line
• Reading omitted data
• Reading string data
• Reading dates and times
• Reading large integers

Lecture 4: Data management

• Appending data
• Merging data
  • Noes about merge
  • Merge with repeated variables
• An example of append and merge
• Wide versus long data
• How to think about variables and their contents

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