Some may find this amusing.
I spent more than an hour last Thursday trying to find
a user written routine somewhere that would do what
-codebook, compact- now does. After a lot of fruitless
searching I decided that writing such a thing myself
would be a good first foray into real Stata programming.
The next morning I fired up Stata and did -update query-.
And there it was, codebook, compact. Stata 9.1 now does exactly what
I wanted.Those folks at Stata Corp. are amazing.
They anticipate my every need before I even ask for it.
One remark about the new -codebook- routine -- it is slow
compared to -summarize- and I assume the reason
is that it calculates the number of unique values for each
variable. It would be nice to be able to turn that off. Things
get quite slow for large data sets, e.g 30+ seconds for a file
containing 50000 cases and a hundred variables on my
relatively slow machine.
Of course, for someone who started computing on an IBM 1410,
complaining about 30 second turn around time is a bit much.
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
