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RE: st: Copy table--how to consistently get correct tab stops
I respectfully disagree with Tim on SPSS v. Stata on this matter. I
used to use SPSS a good deal and still do occasionally, and while
Stata is superior in almost every way, in my opinion SPSS is better
able to create tables that are simple to copy and paste into Excel or
Word for further formatting.
While Tim's technique of inserting text like "zzz" or converting
paragraph marks to tabs might work to copy Stata tables, it still
requires extra steps in Word or Excel that are not necessary with
SPSS. To demonstrate what I mean, below are links to two files
containing the crosstabulation of mpg by rep78 that I used as an
example earlier. In each file, the first table was pasted from Stata
9.2 and the second was pasted from SPSS 11.0. The key difference is
that in both Excel and Word, the SPSS table pasted correctly with no
additional formatting while the Stata table incorrectly added an
extra column. The SPSS table also has the nice feature of not
breaking up the headings into two lines.
https://webfiles.berkeley.edu/~radwin/Copy_table_to_Excel.xls
https://webfiles.berkeley.edu/~radwin/Copy_table_to_Word.doc
In my line of work (university administration), Excel and Word are
the standard for creating and sharing data analysis (although these
analyses are often converted to Powerpoint or PDF for the latter
purpose). Pasting tables quickly, efficiently, and accurately into
these programs is far more important than, say, providing correct
standard errors for multinomial logit for a survey with multistage
sampling.
In fact, copying tables is the main issue that prevents me from
universally recommending Stata to my colleagues (as opposed to SPSS,
SAS, or nothing at all). I wish this were possible from the standard
-tabulate- commands, because most of my colleagues are not interested
in learning -display- or -tabout- to get a properly formatted table
into Word or Excel when they could do so more easily in SPSS.
David
At 9:47 AM +0100 7/6/07, Mak, Timothy wrote:
I don't use SAS so I cannot comment on SAS, but I have to say Stata is
far far more flexible in its output of nicely formatted tables than SPSS
can ever be. I don't use the Copy Table function, but what I do is I use
the -display- function to get the stats in exactly the format I want. Ok
I don't know how to generate a 'tab' in Stata, but instead of tab, I can
generate a funny piece of string, say "zzz" or something, and use copy
text in Stata to paste the whole thing in Word. Use Find/Replace to
change all the "zzz" to tabs, then use Convert text to table in Word.
Voila. Done! No need to fix up decimal places, change the order of the
stats, etc. Output is always consistent as long as you type your
-display- function the same way. Down side is, of course you need to
learn to write the -display- command, but the time saved will soon make
it worthwhile.
Tim
PS An even quicker way is to use paragraph marks instead of tabs, and
then just use Convert text to table in Word, and adjust the number of
columns.
--
David Radwin, Principal Analyst // [email protected]
Office of Student Research, University of California, Berkeley
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