Thanks to Kit Baum, my program -tabsort- has
been updated on SSC.
For some reason which escapes me -- I think
it just seemed sensible at the time -- this
program is deemed part of two packages,
-tabsort- and -tab_chi-. So you could install
either. (Or both, but there is no point to that.)
The program -tabsort-
=====================
-tabsort- was written originally about 1998 as a
wrapper for -tabulate- to work around the fact that
you could not ask for rows or columns to be sorted.
That is, suppose you want frequencies tabulated.
You might want rows and/or columns sorted from
high frequency to low frequency, or possibly vice
versa.
Or suppose you want another variable summarized,
so that means and/or sds are shown.
You might want rows and/or columns sorted from
high summary measure to low summary measure,
or possibly vice versa.
Now, in Stata 8, -tabulate- has a -sort- option,
so it might seem that -tabsort- has lost its
rationale. However, that -sort- option does one thing only,
produce one-way tables sorted from high frequencies
to low, so -tabsort- is not yet superseded.
The prompt for this update was a bug fix.
Lee Sieswerda alerted the list to what looked
like a bug: the help file said there was
an option -summarize()-; if you then
typed that whole option name -summarize()-
-tabsort- would squawk, as the option
was implemented as -summari()-. This
wasn't a bug when the program was written,
due to a limit on the length of
local macro names and what Stata then indulged.
But it's a bug now, so the program has been fixed.
Thanks to Lee for the report.
Also, I brought it up-to-date to Stata 8 and
found and fixed another bug, hitherto unreported.
So, -tabsort- is now a Stata 8 program.
In addition, both the -tabsort- package
and the -tab_chi- package contain -tabsort6-
which is a fixed version of -tabsort- that
I hope will work on Stata 6 or Stata 7.
(I no longer have a copy of Stata 6
installed, but I'll respond to any problem
reports.)
-tabsort- and -tab_chi- packages
================================
The -tabsort- package just contains
-tabsort- and -tabsort6-. If you
install on Stata 8, -tabsort- is the
program to use. If you install on
Stata 6 or 7, -tabsort6- is the program
to use. (Stata 5 or below: sorry, no joy.)
The -tab_chi- package contains other
stuff as well, in the area of tabulation
and chi-square tests. Mostly these programs
all originated around 1998 as work-arounds
or extras given various gaps in what
-tabulate- provides. (Other tabulation
programs which I've written since are in
other packages. My favourites are
-extremes-, -majority-, -groups-,
-makematrix- and -tabcount-.)
. ssc desc tab_chi
gives the full picture for -tab_chi-, which is a little
complicated. Old stuff which still works
and is relevant to users of Stata 6 or Stata
7 is maintained while it is not too much pain
to keep it going; typically that
means bug fixes, but no enhancements.
Of the programs in -tab_chi-, -tabchi- and
its immediate version -tabchii- are the nearest
to being obsolete -- if you have Stata 8. But
even -tabchi- can do things which -tabulate-
can't.
(If you're thinking that this whole
area of tabulation is really messy right now
in Stata, with all these user-written bits
and pieces, on top of all the official
commands: you're right.)
Nick
[email protected]
Nick
[email protected]
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