Re: st: variables copy

["b. water" <barleywater@hotmail.com>]

all criticisms accepted, my suggestions has indeed many pitfalls. yang li 
could see most pitfalls as stated by michael (blasnik) and nick (cox) - 
possibly more that remain unstated. consider these though (and this is not a 
counter-argument/excuse):

1. yang li needs to do this one piece of work and it involves stata and 
never again has to work with stata - might not worth the time to learn it.

2. yang li needs to do use stata for first time but no access to manuals, 
learning resources except help, faq's, listers and ucla ats and no helping 
hand within vicinity.

3. yang li is not famililar with stata commands or use of the drop down 
menus

4. yang li is more likely to be familiar with excel (but not perhaps its 
shortcomings as data/statistical management tools) because of its 
ubiquitousness.

in short there is differing level of user initial experience with stata and 
expertise and what s/he wants to get out of the list/stata, whilst the best 
bet is to learn (as i have and still am) and harness stata in the medium to 
long term, in the meantime, there is pending task - hence my suggestion, 
merely an interim. it may, may not help yang li but at least it can be seen 
how else things can be done.

regards,
bw


> From: "Michael Blasnik" <michael.blasnik@verizon.net>
> Reply-To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
> To: <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu>
> Subject: Re: st: variables copy
> Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2005 08:26:32 -0500
>
> This is a terrible idea on many levels -- not only can you lose precision 
> and labeling, not only does it require you to do something that isn't 
> documented or automatically repeatable (through do/log files), but why 
> would you ever want to tediously cut and paste columns in Excel when you 
> could much more easily just type drop or keep in Stata?  These aren't 
> tricky commands.
>
> Michael Blasnik
> michael.blasnik@verizon.net
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