Alexandra got some excellent advice from Roy Wada. I have some further
suggestions. I really can't advise on how best to use Excel.
Alexandra has three variables,
state
year
status
I am not clear what -state- is for real. Let's imagine that it means the
50 states of the United States. -year- takes on 41 distinct values and
-status- 2 distinct values. In this thought experiment there are 50 * 41
* 2 cells or 4100 cells.
Even small tricks of fine tuning can not make effective display of 4100
cells at all easy.
An old device is to fall back on a list
state status year frequency
which is possible with -groups- from SSC.
Another old device is to plot the data, not tabulate it.
Nick
Green Alexandra <[email protected]> wrote on 30 Jul 2009:
I am trying to create a table to follow the trends in some over time.
In this case, I have monthly data on rainfall by state over time, 1960
to 2000. Status is a dummy that tracks if rainfall in that month is
above (A) or below (B) average for that month over time. So I want the
table to show frequencies for the number of months that are A and B,
over the sample period.
2 Questions:
1. using tab3way seems to give me what I wish for (see partial output
below), but since I have to cover a space of 40 years over all the
states, the output wraps around the result window and is very
unsightly.
=> Is there a way for me to ask stata to export the results, so I can
recreate a table that's more reader-friendly say in Excel?
. tab3way state status year
Table entries are cell frequencies
Missing categories ignored
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| year and status
| -- 1990 -- -- 1991 -- -- 1992 -- -- 1993 --
state | A B A B A B A B
----------+----------------------------------------------------------------
1 | 1 2 3 1 2 1 2
2 | 1 1 1 1
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
2. Is there a way to have stata output frequencies for months that are
above average and months that are below average for the same state on
2 rows in an alternating fashion (such as in the "wanted" result)?
Wanted:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| year and status
| -- 1990 -- -- 1991 -- -- 1992 -- -- 1993 --
state | A B A B A B A B
----------+----------------------------------------------------------------
1 | 1 3 2 2
| 2 3 2 2
2 | 1 0 0 1
| 1 1 0 1
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
