Excel import - 3 data columns appearing as string.....

[mo richi]

EDIT: I found the problem. I had 4 cells with ".." in them....... i blanked them out and it worked. Sorted.


I have a dataset here:
DELETED - PROBLEM SOLVED

when i load it into stata, 3 of the data columns, data2005-data2008 are coming up as string variables, even though the rest of the columns are not.
All columns have come from the same data sources.......

i cannot understand why.
I've tried copying the data into a different excel file, i've tried changing 'text to columns' in excel, but no success.

i just don't get it, this data is from the same sources i've got other data from, and i've been using that dataset in stata with no issue.
any ideas?

[William Lisowski]

If Stata imports a column as a string variable rather than numeric, that means the column must contain some value that cannot be interpreted as a number. Here's how I found one such example.

. tab data2005

          data2005 |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
-------------------+-----------------------------------
-.0099083853533924 |          1        0.04        0.04
-.0130029481058316 |          1        0.04        0.08
 -.056414197038446 |          1        0.04        0.13
-.0926233089815177 |          1        0.04        0.17
 -15.8416948621915 |          1        0.04        0.21
 -25.2242438200254 |          1        0.04        0.25
                .. |          3        0.13        0.38
 .0001508106031052 |          1        0.04        0.42
 .0002369679477154 |          1        0.04        0.46
 .0006533214832723 |          1        0.04        0.50
 .0013199647305424 |          1        0.04        0.55
   .00136979865848 |          1        0.04        0.59
--Break--
r(1);

You need to correct these values of ".." in your spreadsheet for Stata to import the values as numeric.

[Nick Cox]

Other such threads can be found with a search. One such is https://www.statalist.org/forums/for...iable-problems -- which includes code for a diagnostic program.