Failure to open dta (The designated file is stored in an unsupported cross-product format)

[Aaron Fehll]

Hi All,

I have an old file I made using stata16. However, my department upgraded to Stata 17 and now when I try to open a dta file I recieve the following error

The designated file is stored in an unsupported cross-product format r(609).

I would be eternally grateful if anyone had any insight as to how to load this file.

Thanks!

[Nick Cox]

This reminds me dimly of a file format supported some decades ago that I never saw used by anybody. But I am mystified at how you could create such a file in 16 and find it unreadable in 17. Perhaps you can

type whatever.dta

and show us early output, as sometimes that shows what the file is like, or what it contains, even if the file is binary.

[Aaron Fehll]

Hi Nick thanks for getting back!

It presents row after row of exactly what my data looks like. Just numbers, strings and factor variables. There is nothing crazy in the data set and I have never used anything other than a save command in the do file.

21239,21239,2019,Woodford,5629,5629,4,4,.24425825, .56198102,.19376075,.52023643,.4797636,.05498616,. 94501382,.096812494,.5620625,.34212503,26734,0,0,1 ,0,1,0,1,3,3.1306441,0
> ,0,0,13,12,0,,0,,,,,5,2.3124382,0,3,1.8184465,0,15 2.27,5.0256553,,40051.66347481406,10.597925,,57939 .69625439808,10.967158,,49290.51797087249,10.80548 7,,24995.32356477976
> ,10.126444,,,,,1.12265,,,,-46,-47,0,2116,0,13,12,-48,0,1.7917595,1.3862944,0,0,-.00089475716,-.0015328712,-.0033683868,-.0019054022,0,0,0,2018,2017,2016,-47,-47,-47,0,0,0
> ,0,0,0,0

[Clyde Schechter]

The output shown in #3 looks to me like you "saved" your data as a .csv file rather than as a .dta file (notwithstanding its name), and did so without retaining the variable names. If there is nothing else wrong with the file later on, you should be able to bring it back with -import delimited-. You will then have to then rename the variables to their appropriate names, and perhaps create variable and value labels (which are lost in the .csv format). Then, you should save your data as a true .dta file using the -save- command.

[Nick Cox]

Note that assigning an extension (here .dta) does not itself imply a particular file type. Nor will save use any file format other than the .dta format even if you specify a different extension. Nor will export delimited save a file that is .dta format even with that extension.

There is a problem here insofar as the error message is not helpful!

[Aaron Fehll]

Thanks Clyde and Nick. It was saved as a csv with a dta extension. I was able to import it as a csv. Thanks so much!