User comments

Just loaded my Version 11 of Stata, and am really pleased with the new features. The addition of having the PDFs of the manuals is quite a bonus! Every fall, I teach a course that introduces about 70 new people (all budding medical researchers) to Stata, and it continues to be an invaluable teaching tool, as well as a highly efficient method for data analysis. Keep up the great work!

Joanne Garrett, Center for Women’s Health Research, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

I have been doing my research work by the use of Stata/SE release 11 for a week (freshly).

I would like to communicate that the new Variables Manager and Data Editor are, in my opinion, terrific! And the new Factor Variables module also does rouse my admiration, indubitably.

It is really a great pleasure to invoke Stata every day!

Mariusz Mianowany, Academy of Humanities & Economics, Poland

Your responsiveness and skill are greatly appreciated. You at StataCorp are setting, I think, a new standard for statistical software, and also a new standard for interactions with your customers.

William Mason, Department of Sociology, UCLA

Stata has world-class customer service!

Cheryl Tiahrt, Manager of Technology Services, Information Technology Services, The University of South Dakota

It is nice to see that after many years Stata remains a wonderful company!

Andrea Ichino, Department of Economics, European University Institute

I was introduced to Stata while a Ph.D. student at Penn back in 1993 or 94, and have found it to be the best and most user-friendly statistical package.

James Chriss, Sociology Department, Cleveland State University

StataCorp has to be the best, most responsive and technically capable organization of its kind. Over the many years we have been using Stata, we have had nothing but first class service—keep it up!

Martin Kendal-Reed, Sensory Research Institute, Florida State University

These are without competition the best-written and organized manuals for complex software I have ever seen, and certainly the only ones that on occasion make me laugh out loud.

Charles Murray, Bradley Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

This is why I like Stata so much. Not only is it a great software, the folks at Stata are always very helpful.

George Dranitsaris, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

Without doubt Stata is an amazing, sophisticated and wonderful statistical package. I am very pleased.

Willy Rice, School of Law, St. Mary’s University

Stata is a very powerful, very reliable, and very flexible program.

Marc Feldesman, Department of Anthropology, Portland State University

Stata is one of the finest companies I’ve ever dealt with.

Steven Samuels, Department of Epidemiology, University of Albany

I just wanted to let you know that I think your licensing procedure that allows users to install a copy at work and at home is simply wonderful. It allows me to be more productive. Thanks for being so reasonable in an age when reasonableness seems to be lacking!

Jack Laverty, Columbia Gas of Ohio

Stata is awesome! I have been using it to do analyses on panel data. Love it! [...] As a statistician I get to learn new software it seems almost monthly. I have to tell you...Great software, great service too. You guys run rings around SPSS they want to nickle and dime me for everything.

Elaine Bellucci, Statistician, Bellucci Company

Stata = best general purpose statistical program on the market!

Martin Biewen, Department of Economics, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt a.M., Germany

Thank you as always for the service. I must say that in the short time I have been dealing with Stata, I have been truly impressed with the high level of service from the company. If only other companies could match this!

Roger Debreceny PhD FCPA CMA , Division of Accounting, Nanyang Technological University

I’m new to Stata (1.5 months), but I have already began to love the programmability.

Michael Ingre, Department of Psychology, Stockholm University & National Institute for Psychosocial Medicine

As a biostatistician with responsibility for dealing with daily inquiries from the medical and dental schools in my university, I find that Stata provides the broadest statistical base for data analysis—particularly with regard to the less commonly found routines, such as survival analysis (including Cox’s regression), conditional logistic regression, ordered and multinomial logistic regression, Poisson regression, and negative binomial regression.

Alan Kelly, Department of Statistics, Department Community Health & General Practice, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Just a short thank-you note for a putting together a fine product and an amazing group of people. My co-author and I just had a paper published in the Journal of Political Economy. The entire analysis was conducted in Stata. Stata handled the task effortlessly. Over the course of the past year I have received fantastic support—without technical support’s help our paper would have been delayed by over a year.

My thanks to everyone at Stata. We teach our undergraduates Stata in the hope that more corporations will see the light.

Amitabh Chandra, Department of Economics, University of Kentucky

Stata is easy to use, very powerful, includes most non-linear models people usually think of (and that other packages only include as add-ons).

Jose Camoes Silva, M.I.T. Sloan School of Management

I have been using Stata for close to 15 years now and think it is just a great package. One thing that makes it great is the terrific support staff who are available to help users.

Daniel Sherman, Senior Economist, Pelavin Research Center

I think you have a wonderful statistical package, and your company is always very helpful whenever I have questions.

Georg Dranitsaris, Ontario Cancer Institute, Princess Margaret Hospital

We’ve been using our [...] copy of Stata 9 for over a year now, and have been able to accomplish some tremendous things with it. I’d like to extend warm thanks for your generosity, as well as some praise for a really excellent piece of software.

First of all, Stata deserves high marks for being easy to learn. Programming is so easy that I practically never write repetitive commands anymore.

I’ve been very pleased with Stata’s graphing abilities, and we use Stata-generated graphs extensively in our political coverage to explain poll averages and other quantitative data in ways that our competitors can’t. (For example, see here: http://blogs.forbes.com/trailwatch/2008/04/obama-holds-rec.html and here: http://blogs.forbes.com/trailwatch/2008/05/the-message-of.html; click on the graph images to enlarge.) Stata performs so well that I'm delighted to credit it at the bottom of every graph that we create.

Stata’s data-handling abilities are outstanding; I use Stata to comb through databases when I’m doing preliminary research before starting on articles, and I’ve developed lots of article ideas from data that Stata makes it easy to examine.

In short, excellent software-the best program of any sort that I’ve ever used. I look forward to opening it up every day.

Jonathan Bruner, Forbes Magazine

Your user support at Stata is really the best I’ve ever experienced from statistics software companies. SAS and SPSS don’t come anywhere close.

Dr. John P. Haisken-DeNew, DIW-Berlin, German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP)

Let me note that through the years I have found the program, but particularly the technical support, absolutely wonderful.

Sheldon L. Messinger, Professor Emeritus, Law and Society Center, University of California, Berkeley

I continue to be impressed by the high level of technical support that y’all provide. It’s fabulous!

Lindsey Jeanne Leininger, PhD student, University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy Studies

Thank you so much for your great customer service. I certainly appreciate being able to work with a company willing to help out their customers in a timely fashion.

Diane Benckert, Office Manager, School of Public Health, Drexel University

I have taken one of the Stata Web Courses and have used it extensively since ’89 as well as using it for my dissertation. I have found it be one of the most satisfactory stats packages on the market.

Kevin Wilhite, Indiana University

The product you have is first rate, but it can’t compare with the degree of service you guys provide across all levels of expertise.

Elmer Villanueva, MD ScM, Centre for Clinical Effectiveness, Monash Institute of Health Services Research

I am extremely impressed with the level of service we have received with this order. Like your software, the support components of your business appear to be in great working order as well.

Joseph Dorris, Altarum Institute

I am busy converting my whole department to Stata; the manuals are marvels of clarity and win them over every time.

Christie Brown, Assistant Professor of Marketing, The University of Michigan

I discovered this remarkable package several months ago and am still amazed by its depth and breadth. It is also incredibly fast (on SUN) and relatively inexpensive.

Richard McCleary, School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine

Two days ago I received Stata for Windows. Although not addicted to Windows, I succeeded in running my first (simple) logistic analysis within 30 minutes after unpacking the disks! Comparing with other packages Stata is incredibly fast and very powerful, especially the graphics part is a relief for every one who wants to evaluate fit, and is described in to-the-point manuals. As I did not leave my room the last 2 days, colleagues came asking what I did and I showed them Stata.

Klaas Frankena, Agricultural University, Wageningen, Netherlands

Stata folks’ input to this listserver is one reason I encourage colleagues to use Stata.

John C. LeBlanc, MD, MSc, FRCPC, Assistant Professor, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Community Health and Epidemiology, Dalhousie University

Incidentally, one of the really neat features of Stata is the indexing of the STB through the search command. It is a major reason for submitting to the STB rather than to SUGI. One of the things that I like about Stata is that it has the feel of a small company that still cares about its users. This is greatly appreciated.

William Dupont, Vanderbilt University

Off the top of my head here are some reasons why I use Stata almost exclusively:

It has the best coverage for biostatistics/epidemiology as far as I can see.

It is easy to install, but if you have any problems whatsoever, be it with installation or otherwise, they have a hotline (1-800-STATA-PC) which is high quality. They are honest; if they do not know the answer immediately they will admit to it and get back to you on it, rather than try to con you out of the question.

The capabilities include all the standard things (data filtering, statistical models, great graphics) and some non-standard, but useful things like survival (cox, logrank,...), Mantel–Haenszel, logistic (probit, tobit,...), etc. Plus, if what you want is not there, they have a programming language built in.

Reasonably priced.

Works on all sorts of platforms, including the big three: Unix, Windows, and Macintosh.

Good on-line help.

Good manuals (maybe a smidgen difficult to use, but they make up for it in thoroughness).

Not buggy.

Consistent interface.

Forever updating. For example, the new version for Windows has a spreadsheet data editing feature that is really snazzy.

Interfacing with printers, word processors, etc., is good.

They have an ongoing bulletin with useful additions, articles, etc. (I am an associate editor on their bulletin. No remuneration. Above is honest opinion.)

All this is off the top of my head, and I am sure I have left some important stuff out. Contact them directly, they take pride in their work and they have a good product. I am sure they can give you a better pitch than I have.

Marcello Pagano, Harvard School of Public Health

May in technical support has been helping me along so far and has been the greatest! She has really helped me understand quite a bit!

Noelle Hartwick, RN, MPH, Cardiovascular, Diabetes, Nutrition, & Physical Activity Section, Washington State Department of Health

I want to take just a moment of your time to recognize Pete Huckelba for the exceptional customer service he provided. Pete took the time to thoroughly research the possible reasons for my difficultly in accessing the Stata website and provided a complete "layman" overview of what he found.

He also made suggestions as to other possible explanations, gave me solutions to try, and initiated a means to track future problems. He was kind, reassuring, and willing to be available for any future questions or concerns. I am very impressed with him and hope that he will be recognized for his “extra mile” efforts!!!!

Shawn Regan, STEPS to a Healthier US Project Manager, Chelan/Douglas Health District

Once again I would like to point out that the tech support is absolutely great in responding to the questions!

Altay Mussurov, School of Management and Business, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales, United Kingdom

I am writing to you today to offer my highest praise for the help I recently received from your consultant, May. I wrote to Stata technical support last week regarding how to obtain and plot weighted Schoenfeld residuals using Stata. A complication was that previous versions of Stata had taken advantage of a collection of user-written ado-files. I confess that I use Stata only infrequently, typically for modeling tasks using the xt commands, so I felt very out of my element with the query that I posted to your Technical Support group regarding plotting residuals from Cox proportional hazards models.

May handled my question promptly and with great aplomb. I was pleased that she did not dismiss my questions because I was using another user’s user-written ado-files. To the contrary, she diagnosed the functionality of those files and showed me a much more efficient mechanism to obtain their functionality by using new features in Stata 8. Most impressively, she went beyond answering the questions I’d posed. Anticipating the context under which I was posing my questions, she provided terrific commentary not only on the Stata syntax, but also on the purpose of the analysis and in her note she walked through an example of the code she provided, not only explaining the code itself but also how to interpret the results. I was ecstatic that May provided such a thoughtful, detailed response because while the code alone would have been very useful to me, the code coupled with the interpretation of the example data May used was far more useful to me as I can now apply the code with confidence to my own data. Clearly, May is very gifted at identifying a user’s level of expertise (or lack thereof, as was the case for me) with a particular problem area and adapting her response to match the user’s level of sophistication in any given area.

I hope this note conveys both the gratitude I feel towards May for her outstanding responses over the past week and the esteem in which I hold your Technical Support group. This experience will definitely prompt me to recommend Stata to my colleagues and will encourage me to use Stata for more of my modeling tasks than I do at present.

Tor Neilands, University of California, San Francisco

I had been having trouble with upgrading ado-files ... after considerable effort, I received, quite unexpectedly, a phone call from Kevin Crow at Stata Tech Support who had decided that since we were not getting anywhere after many repeated email attempts, he would contact me personally to help. I must say I was tremendously impressed to get that phone call. I had been cautious in using up Stata Tech Support time in that I had used both email (extensively) and the Statalist first, but my experiences with other tech support providers make me aware that it is very very impressive to get that kind help and concern about resolving my problem. My thanks, and kudos, both to Kevin, and to Stata for providing that kind of support. Sure makes buying the upgrades a great value!

Buzz Burhans, Department of Animal Science, Cornell University

I would like to acknowledge the excellence of the book I recently ordered from you, An Introduction to Survival Analysis Using Stata by Cleves, et al. My main use of Stata will be survival analysis, especially parametric regression analysis, and I ordered this book to get an in-depth look at the capabilities of Stata in that regard before buying the program.

I was not expecting much from a “company” book but was very impressed with its completeness, accuracy, and informative style. The authors spend as much effort in explaining ‘why’ as in telling ‘how’. I read the whole book, and even recommended it to clinicians in a review article I just happened to be writing while I was reading it.

Gary Grunkemeier, PhD, Director of Medical Data Research, Providence Health System, Portland, Oregon

I am writing this message to express my great thanks to your support. Brian P. Poi, your support statistician, is extremely excellent. He always gives most proper answers to my questions, which makes me get over all problems I encounter in programming Stata. I have never had such a good user support as his. I would like to express my sincere thanks to your support and hope that you will keep this high-quality user support in the future.

Nobutaka Fukuda, PhD, Department of Sociology, Musashi University, Tokyo, Japan

Thank you very much for answering my questions to Stata so fast. I was really surprised about the service that exists for your users.

Dagmar Biberger, University of Munich

In the future, I’ll let people know that the customer service alone is one of the reasons why they should buy Stata—Stata certainly holds an edge on its competitors in this regard.

Stephen Lich-Tyler, Department of Economics, University of Texas at Austin

I want to tell you that we are very satisfied with your support from Stata!

Cecilia Holmberg, IT-section, Ministry of Finance in Sweden

First, thank you very much for the well written reply. Second, that is the fastest response to a tech support question that I have, or probably ever will, receive.

John Kinker, Benchmark Environmental Corp.

Three years ago, I started teaching a one week seminar at U Michigan’s ICPSR Summer Training Program. Nobody at ICPSR had been using Stata, and StataCorp generously provided copies of the program and documentation. Three years later, Stata is becoming the software of choice in the classes. This year, StataCorp offered a very generous price (the grad pac price) to participants. Several people in my class were feeling a bit pressured to make a decision and I told them not to worry that the folks at Stata are very reasonable. Indeed, when these people called, those answering the phone went to great lengths to work out POs, payment, and all the details. And, the support staff at ICPSR report that the help they receive if they have a problem is absolutely first rate.

I’m always reluctant to recommend software, but I’m pleased to report that everyone who has taken my suggestion to try Stata has been very pleased.

J. Scott Long, Department of Sociology, Indiana University

I ran a crossed random effect binary model today on some data I got this afternoon, which has 72 observations per subject, 120 subjects, 3 conditions for the study variable that’s random.

It ran on the first try, in under 15 minutes.

Now obviously this involves having “good” data with pretty big effects, but as anyone who ran these kinds of models even a few years ago can attest, estimating a crossed random effect is no easy task, but xtmelogit did everything with no sweat, no messy model specification, etc.

Thanks, and Merry Xmas a few days early (or is it Happy Hanukah on time).

Jay Verkuilen, Department of Educational Psychology, CUNY Graduate Center

I’ve used a lot of stat packages over the years, but I find that I’m using Stata 95% of the time now. It’s wonderful! Its speed and power are much touted, but its simplicity for beginners is perhaps one of its best features.

Rodney Hayward, University of Michigan’s Schools of Medicine & Public Health, Ann Arbor VA’s Health Services Research Field Programming

Thanks for the quick response. Excellent tech support is one of many reasons I love Stata.

Ginger Zhe Jin, Department of Economics, University of Maryland

Stata’s technical support is excellent. It is indicative of a sincere effort to provide a good product. I wish other companies had similar attitudes.

Jon Mormino, Department of Demography, Georgetown University

Thanks for the amazingly quick response! As always, you guys are the best of any of the companies I have to/get to deal with!

Tom Durkin, PhD, Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina

If we were asked to rate vendors, I would definitely rate Stata five stars.

Diane Kaczor, University of North Carolina

Stata is a great software package. This dataset in current form has almost 16,000 cases and 201 variables—what little I have done in this dataset I stood amazed at the speed—even more so if, for example, I compare it with Excel, which I am also using with this dataset.

Piet Becker, Medical Research Council, Biostatistics Unit

This kind of responsiveness is what makes Stata a first-class operation.

Al Feiveson, NASA

I switched virtually all of our analysis work from mainframe SAS to Stata on the PC (and a little bit on UNIX) a few years ago and have never regretted that decision for a second. Most impressive is the fact that you guys find fixes for every problem or question that we have, quickly and efficiently. And little by little, as Stata develops, we are dropping the other programs we use, too. I don’t know of any other software company that responds as well to its users’ questions, suggestions, and comments.

Great work!

Julien Teitler, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania

Thank you for your quick reply ... your customer support is legendary and I now understand why.

Jonathan Gage, World Trade Institute, Berne, Switzerland