esttab and tabstat

[Eddie Pengma]

Dear all,

Thank you so much for help me and I am alwasy confusing between esttab and tabstat command. Could you please tell me the differences?

Best,

Eddie

[Marcos Almeida]

There are several differences. To start, tabstat is a regular command that comes with Stata, whereas esttab/estout is not a command, but a user-written program, hence we need to install it before using the commands. Second, the first one aims at giving "a compact table of summary statistics" whereas the second expands the possibilities of rendition of outputs under a complex table array. Hopefully that helps.

[Nils Enevoldsen]

The clue is in the names.

tabstat creates a table of (summary) statistics.

esttab creates a table of estimation results.

There is a third command that you didn't name, that also creates confusion. estout is a package of commands that includes the commands estout and esttab, among others. estout is the "engine" behind esttab. It can be used directly, but is best avoided until you have more familiarity with esttab. If you run your esttab command with the option noisily, it will show you the internal estout command used to create the table.