RE: st: Stata 12: wish list

[Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

I think that is a good summary of a widely held view. I have no axe to grind here as I am not a provider in the main territory that Thomas has in mind, but on behalf of fellow user-programmers I suggest that the descriptor "ad hoc" does not quite fit the situation. 

Of the programs implied here, and that I know about, I'd say that they all have a clear vision of what they want to do which has been maintained throughout their development. It can seem ad hoc if you want to do something else, but that is a different matter. As I've already remarked in this thread, user-programmers tend to write programs for themselves, with no guarantee of meeting anyone else's needs. 

The overall problem here is describable in two words "better tables" and lots of users want to second that. But some want more unified syntax for tables within Stata, some want more detailed control, some want greater support for export to their own favourite foreign programs, standard or otherwise, and some want two or three of those. All understandable enough, but don't complain if this all turns into a [T] manual several hundred pages long to meet not only your reasonable requests, but most other people's too!

Emphasis here varies depending on where you come from. Some people seem routinely to be producing tens or hundreds of tables in rigid formats full of coefficients, standard errors and P-values and those awful stars. Do people actually read them too? 

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

P.S. On a key question of intellectual priority, I lay claim to "Some Alternative Software", as indeed could anyone else who came up with it earlier or later.  But (with thanks to Maarten for the compliment) the joke about there being so many standards to choose from is certainly not mine. Andrew Tanenbaum got there much earlier. 

Thomas Speidel

While I understand the intricacies of such a task, for me too this has  
been on the wish list for some time.  Judging from the number of  
user-written programs, the presentations at user group meetings and  
conferences and how Some Alternative Sofwtare (don't remember who came  
up with this acronym) fares in this area, I suspect the folks at Stata  
are taking notice.  I am not sure how far up this topic is in the  
priority list.

One common response I hear is that solutions exists in the form of  
user written programs.  There is a large number of great work (Ian  
Watson, John Gallup, Michael Lokshin, Ben Jann, Roger Newson to name a  
few authors).  But these tend to be ad-hoc solutions:  some only  
handle a certain type of data, some will display p-values but no  
confidence intervals, etc etc. This in my view has the side effect of  
forcing the user to either write his or her program, or produce the  
tables from scratch in Excel/OpenOffice/Latex.

Making more estimates available after estimation and more results  
stored in locals in general could perhaps be a good starting point.   
Eventually, I would love to see more automation in this area from Stata.

Richard Ohrvall 

> I do not know if requests for features in the coming version of Stata
> is of any use, but since it seems as if the Stata people are reading
> this list and they seem like nice people, I take my chance.
>
> I would really like a better support for creating tables in the next
> version of Stata. By this I mean an output of tables that is easily
> imported into Word or any other word processor. I would also like to
> see a bit more flexibility in the table commands. To me it is a bit
> surprising that you e.g. can't control the number of decimals in the
> output of -tab-. This is very annoying when you want to see a
> proportion with a specific number of decimals. All other major
> statistical programs seem to be ahead of Stata in these aspects. Yes,
> I know that there are user-written programs that do these things, but
> these seem like basic functions that should be included in the
> program. One solution could be an optional output window (like the
> graph window), so that those who want to keep the present design and
> output could do so.
>

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