New to stata, Impossible problem for a summary table?

[Sophia Jones]

Hello all- I'm so glad I found this forum! I've just started working with stata for a biostats class. I've been given a problem set to work on and am already stuck on the first question. The professor has asked us to create a descriptive summary table for continuous data that includes both variable name and variable description (as well as sd, mean, min, max, and # of obs). So far I've tried su, fsum, and univar. Adding label as an optino for fsum gets me the "closest" except there's no "variable label" header in the table. Any ideas?

[Ken Chui]

Welcome to Statalist.

I think you might have taken the "Stata" part of the assignment a bit too literally. I would double check with the professor what "create" actually entails: Does it mean they expect you to use only Stata to make that table as if it is an output? Or does it mean it can be through other formats such as adding a table in MS Word? My guess is probably the latter.

As far as I know, general summarizing commands like "summarize" or "tabstat" do not provide variable label. But "summarize" has a ", detail" option that would give a longer output for each variable with the variable label on top. However, that is not a table, but a series of tables. You may have to piece the info together into a table using a word processor like MS Word.

Also, I'd suggest to check what Stata commands have been featured in class so far. If this is an introductory course, there should be some sort of demonstration or Stata exercise from which you can glean some possible answers. Personallyl, I think an exercise that would send new Stata users to hunt for downloadable command like fsum is a bit overkill; I'd like to believe that was not your instructor's motive.

[Sophia Jones]

Thank you, Ken. It turns out that I (and at least a few of my classmates) were taking it too seriously. The professor provided some clarification today about it, which was pretty much just like you suggested- create a table in word using information from stata. Thank you again for responding!