Import and export data from Microsoft Excel

Sometimes, we would like to work with data that are stored in another file format such as Microsoft Excel. It is easy to import data from Excel using Stata's import excel command. It is also easy to export data from Stata to Excel using the export excel command.

Let's begin by opening a Stata system dataset named auto.

. sysuse auto
(1978 automobile data)

Next, let's use Stata's export excel command to export our auto dataset to an Excel file named myauto.

. export excel myauto, sheet(auto) firstrow(variables)
file myauto.xlsx saved

Note that I included two options after the comma: sheet() and firstrow(). The sheet(auto) option saves the data to a sheet named "auto" in the Excel file. And the firstrow(variables) option saves the variable names to the first row of the Excel file. You can verify that the Excel file was exported successfully by typing ls, and you should see a file named "myauto.xlsx".

. ls

   7.6k   2/08/24 15:42  myauto.xlsx

Now we can import our Excel data back into Stata. Let's first type clear to clear Stata's memory.

. clear

Then we use import excel to import the data from the Excel file.

. import excel myauto, sheet(auto) firstrow
(12 vars, 74 obs)

The sheet(auto) option looks the same as it did in our export excel command. Here we simply type firstrow to import the variable names from the first row of the Excel file.

Let's type describe to verify that our data imported successfully.

. describe

Contains data
 Observations:            74
    Variables:            12



Variable      Storage   Display    Value
    name         type    format    label      Variable label

make            str17   %17s                  make
price           int     %10.0gc               price
mpg             byte    %10.0g                mpg
rep78           byte    %10.0g                rep78
headroom        double  %10.0g                headroom
trunk           byte    %10.0g                trunk
weight          int     %10.0gc               weight
length          int     %10.0g                length
turn            byte    %10.0g                turn
displacement    int     %10.0g                displacement
gear_ratio      double  %14.2f                gear_ratio
foreign         str8    %9s                   foreign

Sorted by: 
     Note: Dataset has changed since last saved.

Finally, we save the data we just imported in Stata's .dta format.

. save myauto
file myauto.dta saved

You can watch a demonstration of these commands by clicking on the link to the YouTube video below. You can read more about these commands by clicking on the links to the Stata manual entries below.

See it in action

Watch Import Excel® data into Stata.