st: Any way to get around Maxvar problem without upgrading?

["Kimberly Singer" <ksinger@uclink.berkeley.edu>]

I am using Intercooled Stata 8, and am running into the problem of too many variables. The set is 
very large, but I only need about a quarter of the variables, but I cant drop any variables until 
stata reads them in and defines the variables. Is there a way to drop some variables before stata 
defines them? Upgrading to SE is not really an option. 
Alternately, if anyone knows a method to read the dct. and .dat files into excel, I could delete 
the columns there, then read the remaining variables into stata. 
thanks for any help!
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