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However, it's much more common to know what you want to do without knowing what program (if any) can do it. If you know the name of the program you want to use, you can go directly to Installing User-Written Programs. Fortunately Stata includes commands which make this very easy to do. This article will discuss finding, installing, and updating user-written programs. The SSCC does not try to identify some useful set of user-written programs and make them available to everyone.
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#Stata commands install
On the other hand, this means you need to install the user-written programs you want yourself. Thus you don't need to worry about programs you install causing problems for others. You are welcome to install any user-written commands you desire to use, even in the labs, on Winstat or on the Linux servers, because Stata at the SSCC is set up to store the programs you install in your home directory.
#Stata commands archive
Most of these programs are stored at Boston College's Statistical Software Components archive (or SSC, but not to be confused with the UW's Social Science Computing Cooperative or SSCC). A few represent major extensions of Stata's capabilities, such as ice and mim for multiple imputation or gllamm for mixed models. Others calculate results Stata itself does not, such as polychoric for polychoric correlations. Some are conveniences, like outreg for formatting regression output. We don’t need the file path and file extension (.dta) included in our command (like we did with the use command), because the sysuse command tells Stata that it’s using its own data file.There are a tremendous number of user-written programs for Stata available which, once installed, act just like official Stata commands. This data set is called “lifeexp.dta” and is stored in the same location as your Stata software. Now we’re going to actually open a data set … we know, this is exciting! We’re going to open and use a dataset that comes with the Stata software package, with data on life expectancy from different countries around the world. It’s good practice to use the clear command after the use command, just in case you already had a dataset open and you’d forgotten … this could lead to you doing things to your other data set that you did not want to do, such as renaming variables, creating new ones, or even worse … deleting variables or data! If you had a Stata data file called “toothbrushes.dta” saved in your C:\ drive, your use command would look like this: If we have this data set saved (in Stata format!) and stored in our working folders, we could access it using the following use command: Normally we would have a data set (or seven, or fifty two!) that we want to open and do something with. Here are some of the key commands we can use to open data in Stata: So we need to learn some basic commands to even just open our data file so that we can do something with the data. However, when we use software like Stata, we move away from clicking through menus to tell the program what we want it to do. It may come as a surprise to you that we are covering something as basic as opening a data file in this session.