Re: st: How to re-program -save9- for Stata 13?

[Dirk Enzmann <dirk.enzmann@uni-hamburg.de>]

Yes.

I cannot come up with hard numbers, but here are some impressions as to 
the difficulties:

I already bought Stata from my private money (for use at my work!) - 
when I bought it the first time (several years ago) my institution had 
no net license of Stata; even after they decided to invest into a net 
license, I regularary bought new versions because my instituion is too 
slow to invest in updates (at the moment, the most recent version 
available is Stata 11!). I would not starve if I had to buy StatTransfer 
on top of it, but I am really hesitating because this I also had to pay 
subtracting from my salary because this program does not belong to the 
software our institution bought for use of their students or employees.

Until Stata 12 I could live comfortably without StatTransfer - I wrote 
an SPSS script (SPSS2Stata.sbs) to translate SPSS files to Stata and a 
Stata .ado (-dta2sav-) to move Stata files to SPSS. But the way to SPSS 
is blocked now since Stata 13.

Luckily I have bought Stata 12 before, thus I can use it for moving 
files from Stata 13 to SPSS - others, who are new to Stata since version 
13 are not so lucky.

I recently convinced colleagues in Finland to use Stata - but now they 
recognize that they have to buy StatTransfer on top of it. Of course, 
this is my fault, I should have told them before.

Some days ago there was a thread in the SPSS discussion list showing 
that others experience this problem, as well (see: 
http://spssx-discussion.1045642.n5.nabble.com/Stata-to-SPSS-conversion-td5722443.html 
).

Perhaps more important than money is the fact that even buying 
StatTranfer does not help in all situations: It does not preserve labels 
of user missing values (Stata's exended missing values) when 
transferring Stata data to SPSS data (the other way round is also not 
without problems). To overcome this problem, I wrote -dta2sav- 
(availabel on SSC). Unfortunately, if you don't have an older version of 
Stata at your disposal (here, -uses13- can help), you can't use it to 
transfer Stata 13 (format 117) files to SPSS.

Of course, you can blame SPSS for not updating their import routines 
(even the maintenance of R's -foreign- package has been frozen for Stata 
formats after 12, see 
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/foreign/foreign.pdf on page 5), 
but this does not help users who want to use Stata in a context of a 
majority (or important) colleagues still using SPSS.

Dirk

Sat, 19 Oct 2013 12:17:34 +0100, Nick Cox<njcoxstata@gmail.com> wrote:
> So, in summary, you appear to be saying that you know people who could
> afford Stata 13 but are reluctant to buy because they (a) would be in
> difficulty transferring their datasets to SPSS and (b) cannot afford
> StatTransfer as an extra purchase?
>
> That's interesting. I have got to say that they are missing out on a
> great upgrade.
>
> I just checked and a single user academic license [sic] of
> StatTransfer is USD 179.
>
> As I understand, Sergiy's add-ons could help them a lot.
>
> StataCorp would, I think, be interested in hard evidence that they are
> losing out on sales because people really need a kind of "save to
> SPSS" command before they can decide to buy. I have no insight into
> how SPSS is managed.

--
========================================
Dr. Dirk Enzmann
Institute of Criminal Sciences
Dept. of Criminology
Rothenbaumchaussee 33
D-20148 Hamburg
Germany

phone: +49-(0)40-42838.7498 (office)
       +49-(0)40-42838.4591 (Mrs Billon)
fax:   +49-(0)40-42838.2344
email: dirk.enzmann@uni-hamburg.de
http://www2.jura.uni-hamburg.de/instkrim/kriminologie/Mitarbeiter/Enzmann/Enzmann.html
========================================
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