Beginner: Date-Format: 01MMYYYY. How to tell STATA that I have Monthly not daily data

[Karl Kraus]

Hello, sorry for my bad English. I have a maybe trivial question: I downloaded Data from the FED (monthly) on FX-$/€ and it comes in the following format: 01jan1999, 01feb1999, .... 01march2016 as an Excel-File. Now if I try to tell STATA (under "declare Dataset to be time-series data) that this are monthly observations it gives me:

Variable DATE had been formatted %td (a daily period),
and you asked for a monthly period. Are you sure that is
what you want? It has been done; DATE is now formatted %tm.

And than looks like this:

DATE
3147m2
3149m9
3152m1
3154m8
3157m2
3159m9
3162m3
3164m10


How can I tell STATA that this are already monthly observations that just always have 01 for the 1st of the month attached?

Thank you for your help

Karl

[Nick Cox]

Changing a display format will not convert a date from one basis to another.
http://www.stata-journal.com/sjpdf.h...iclenum=dm0067

What you want to know is all documented at

help dates

One way to do it is to import as daily dates and then convert to monthly.

clear
input str11 ddate
"01jan1999"
"01feb1999"
"01march2016"
end
gen mdate = mofd(daily(ddate, "DMY"))
format mdate %tm
list

+----------------------+
| ddate mdate |
|----------------------|
1. | 01jan1999 1999m1 |
2. | 01feb1999 1999m2 |
3. | 01march2016 2016m3 |
+----------------------+

As your variable is already numeric, what is relevant to you is pushing the values through mofd(). after which formatting as a monthly date will make sense.

[Karl Kraus]

Thank you very much. So I did the following:

generate DATEm = mofd(DATE) and THEN changed the format and now I have a Variable DATEm which is 1999m1, 1999m2, ... 2016m2, 2016m3.

[Nick Cox]

Sounds right. But it is (its values are) 468 to 674. It displays as 1991m1 to 2016m3 with display format %tm

[Zeeshan Fareed]

Sir, I want to change the format 1999m1 to 01jan1999? Please help

[Nick Cox]

The form of address "Sir" is not needed here and indeed inappropriate.

See #4 https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...-to-stata-date and ask your question again in that thread if you don't work out an answer.