drop down menus

[Ali Nik]

Hello. I am a new user of Stata and I need to do some quick analysis with the software within the next few weeks. So I do not have enough time to learn the coding for now. My question is that is there any tutorial based on the drop down menus? I would greatly appreciate it if you could introduce me some useful links/videos of such tutorials.

[William Lisowski]

Welcome to Statalist, and to Stata.

I don't have any advice for videos, although I know Stata has s Youtube channel.

If you have not already done so, you should read the Getting Started with Stata manual relevant to your setup. That reads quickly and is the bare minimum of what you need to know to use Stata effectively, whether using Stata commands directly or through the drop-down menus. In general, the drop-down menus correspond 1:1 to Stata commands (and actually generate commands that are shown in Stata's Results window along with the results they generate). The dialog boxes have links to the appropriate Stata help command for the dialog box, so if you can't figure something out, that's a good place to start. So working with the menus is actually a good way of getting experience with the commands for coding.

When you have some time after your analysis is done, Chapter 18 of Getting Started gives suggested further reading, much of which is in the Stata User's Guide. I worked my way through this when I began with Stata, as have other Statalist members. The objective in doing this reading is not so much to master Stata as to be sure you have become familiar with a wide variety of important basic techniques, so that when the time comes that you need them, you might recall their existence, if not the full syntax, and know how to find out more about them in the help files and manual.

All of these Stata manuals are included as PDFs in the Stata installation (since version 11) and are accessible from within Stata - for example, through Stata's Help menu.

Stata supplies exceptionally good documentation that amply repays the time spent studying it - there's just a lot of it. The path I followed surfaces the things you need to know to get started in a hurry and to work effectively.

[Phil Bromiley]

The User's Guide is also very helpful for beginners.

In the bottom of the documentation, there is an index, and under the index is a subject index. If you look at that, you will find a lot of very usable guidance for many Stata analyses.

Most serious users avoid the drop down menus except for very specific purposes or for exploring things. For example, I use the file-open menus to open new data sets - it then gives me the long statement with all the subdirectories right that I can copy and paste into a do file. From then on, I'll use the do file to open the data. An analysis involving much in the way of data manipulation based on drop down menus is hard to replicate. And if you fix something at the beginning of the analysis, you then have to get all the menus right after that to replicate your work.

[Carlo Lazzaro]

Ali:
to the previous excellent advice, I would only add that the core of any further temptative reply rests on what you mean by quick analyses.

[Nick Cox]

While I agree strongly with Phil -- insofar as I regard myself as "serious" -- I will add that typically Stata echoes to the Command window the equivalent of what you select through menus.

Life being what it is I occasionally and my students and colleagues often resort to reading in data from spreadsheet files. I am a big fan of showing others -- and using myself --

db import excel 

as a way to get to see what needs to be imported, and tuning how header lines are to be used or avoided. I then emphasise the command so generated as part of an audit trail.

[Ali Nik]

Ali:
to the previous excellent advice, I would only add that the core of any further temptative reply rests on what you mean by quick analyses.

annual cross sectional regressions. I need to generate new variables, and run the regression for now.

[Ali Nik]

Thank you all for your help and advice.

[Carlo Lazzaro]

Ali:
assuming that you're dealing with a continuous dependent variable, you may want to take a look at -help regress-.
However, if by annual cross-sectional regressions you mean panel data, see -help xtreg-.
As an aside, please note that, as reminded by the FAQ, your chances of getting (more) helpful replies is conditional on posting what you typed and what Stata gave you back and/or an example/excerpt of your data via -dataex-.