Unable to open a file in STATA

[Julianna Grato]

I need to use the data from https://admin.nber.org/data/current-...rvey-data.html for March 2018. It is downloaded as a .zip file instead of .dta. I found someone else asking this same question and followed instructions using 7-zip but I get the same error when I try to open the file: ' not Stata format" Is there any easy way to get this file to open in STATA? Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Justin Niakamal]

If you're referring to a .dta file, it's possible you're using an older version of Stata (ie. the file you're trying to open was created/saved in a newer version).

[William Lisowski]

With no indication of which of the many files at the linked page you attempted to download and no link to the instructions you tried to follow, we can at best guess at the problem and its solution.

On that page we see

All the CPS data files are ASCII files compressed with the Unix compress command.

which suggests they are not Stata datasets but plain text data. Perhaps the file you downloaded and unzipped is CSV or Text Data in a fixed format that you will need to import with the import delimited or infix command, both described in the output of help import.

I also see on that page

SAS, SPSS, and Stata data definition file statements are available for some files.

and clicking that link takes us to a table of datasets and corresponding do-files and dictionaries to read them into Stata. Perhaps that is what you need.