automating output of primary data cleaning queries to excel

[Alison El Ayadi]

Dear Statalisters,

I am working to clean a few sets of primary data and would love to automate the process of automating the development of my list of data queries to send to the fieldworkers - basically I would want to list certain variables and output a core set of variables plus maybe a note on the reason (e.g., missing, odd number, etc.) - writing first to the file, and then continuing to add to the subsequent rows as I move through the variables.

Does anyone have programming that would do this or recommendations on where to look?

Thanks,
Alison

[Mike Lacy]

I think that something in the spirit of what you want is feasible without too much effort, but showing you something would be much easier if you could do the usual of providing a data example using -dataex-, and an illustration of what you would think of as a useful report of error queries. You'd want to show a data example contrived to show some of the kinds of errors of interest.