Maxvar limit in Stata 14?

[Kate Sheahan]

I am trying to use a large dataset in Stata 14. When I try to open it I get the following error message:

"no room to add more variables
Up to 2,048 variables are allowed with this version of Stata. Versions are available that allow up to 32,767
variables."

I have tried to set the maxvar but I get the following message:

"maxvar not settable in this version of Stata
maxvar specifies the maximum number of variables allowed in your data; see help memory. in this version of Stata,
maxvar is fixed at 2,048. Versions of Stata are available that allow up to 32,767 variables."

I do not need all of the variables in this dataset and so could drop many of them, but I don't think that I can do that without first opening the dataset. Do I need another version?

Can anyone help me to figure out how I might be able to use this dataset? Thank you.

[Clyde Schechter]

Are you a time traveler from the future? Stata has not yet released version 14. OK, probably that was a typo.

If you need only some of the variables, and you know what they are you can do:

use list the variables you need here using dataset name here

If you don't know how the variables are named, you can first do

des using dataset name here

That will get you a list of the variable names which can be used for the -use- command.

[Kate Sheahan]

Time traveller. Thanks very much, this was really useful. Is this always the solution to this problem with the set maxvar on Stata 13? Or should I be considering another version?

[Nick Cox]

There is no one solution. Sometimes, you need a different {flavour|flavor} of Stata (rather than version); sometimes you just need to read in part of the data; sometimes a different data structure (long not wide) will help. As you got this dataset from someone who could read and write it, presumably, you might get comments from them.

[daniel klein]

Also see usesome from SSC.

Best
Daniel

[Richard Williams]

http://www.stata.com/products/which-...-right-for-me/

I take it you have wimpy Stata/IC? You might want to splurge and get SE.

Like Nick says, if this is longitudinal data in wide format, you may want to convert it to long format.