st: wide to long

["ALICE DOBSON" <alice_dobson@hotmail.com>]

Hi David, thanks for the response. I transfered each individual variable
file to State using Stat transfer. I renamed the variable using a prefix.
However, when I try:

reshape long totistam, i(firmid) j(year)

I get the following message:

year contains all missing values
r(498);

Could anybody please tell me what's going on? I also tried - mvencode - to
replace missing values with 0 but that did not help either.
Best,
alice


> Start by Stat/Transferring these into Stata.
>
> But your column names of  "1985", "1986" , etc. will get rendered as, I
> believe, "_1985", "_1986", etc..
>
> Each of those needs to be further renamed to have a common prefix that is
> distinct for the given table.  Presumably, each table is one variable, so
> the prefix should correspond to that variable.  Thus, if the table is
> "number of employees" you should rename the variables something like
>   nemp1985, nemp1986, etc.
> If your table is about revenue, then name them rev1985, rev1985, etc.
>
> (You could, alternatively, change the column names in the Excel tables.
> But in any case, for the transfer to go smoothly, the Excel tables need to
> be "clean" -- have just the column names in the first row, and the data in
> all subsequent rows.)
>
> Do this for each table.
> Then you will want to merge all the tables together.
>
> Presumably you also want to -reshape wide-.  That could come before or
> after the merge.
>
> Hope this helps.
> --David
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
> [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu]On Behalf Of David Kantor
> Sent: 17 October 2006 14:17
> To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
> Subject: Re: st: Wide to Panel
>
>
> At 08:24 AM 10/17/2006, Alice Dobson wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > I have a datafile containing an unabalanced panel of firms for a period
> of
> > around 10 years. This file contains data on around five variables. I have
> > procured additional data on around 15 firm-level variables for these set
> of
> > firms. However, the problem is that each variable is in a different excel
> > file and that too in a wide format. I can transfer these files into stata
> > format using stat transfer. Could anyone please tell me if its possible
> to
> > convert these multiple data files into one datafile in the panel format?
> >
> > Each individual file for a single variable looks like this. There are 15
> > such files, one for each varible. The numberf of firms is too large and
> > hence will take a lot of time to do by hand.
> >
> > FIRM     1985    1986   1987   1988   1989   1990   1991   1992   1993
> 1994
> > FIRM1   100      123      124     3001     293   324   512        413
> > FIRM2
> > FIRM3
> > FIRM4
> > :
> > :
> > :
> > :
> > FIRM1002
> >
> >
> > Best,
> > Alice
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