Data file not opening

[Sumit Mahajan]

Hello!
I am new to STATALIST. I have subscription of STATA 19 SE. When I am trying to open a STATA file from another source, it is not opening and giving this error message "dataset too large
This dataset was created by Stata/MP and has more variables than your Stata can handle."
How can I overcome this problem with the current STATA subscription?

[Nick Cox]

Do you need all those variables?

Perhaps you can solve the problem by specifying particular variables on whatever command you are using to open the dataset.

Perhaps the dataset provider can produce a dataset with fewer variables.

[eric_a_booth]

Sumit Mahajan if the issue is accessing the subset of data you want to read into memory you can use

describe using mydata.dta

to view the variable list and number of observations
you can then use a subset like:

use var1-var100 using mydata.dta

or

use var1 in 1/1000 using mydata.dta

to select subsets of data
See this helpful video on 'using a subset' from Stata for more : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MidZ40Bdpeg

[Sumit Mahajan]

Nick Cox Answer to your queries and questions:
"1. Do you need all those variables?" No I don't need all these variables, but many of them will be used to create the Household ID variable.

2. "Perhaps you can solve the problem by specifying particular variables on whatever command you are using to open the dataset." Can you please help me in doing that, since the dataset is not opening?

3. "Perhaps the dataset provider can produce a dataset with fewer variables": Dataset is a unit level data provided by Ministry of Statistics which can only be downloaded directly from their portal.

[Carlo Lazzaro]

Sumit:
the Ministry of Statistics portal might offer you an option to customise the variables to be downloaded accoding to your research goals.

[Nick Cox]

Thanks for the detail. #3 from eric_a_booth is already an answer to your question in #5.

[daniel klein]

For a convenience tool, see usesome (from SSC or GitHub).

[Sumit Mahajan]

Carlo Lazzaro they don't do that for anyone.
eric_a_booth when I used describe command, it returned with "no variables defined".

[Sumit Mahajan]

An important update though; the data was available in variety of formats like .sav, .csv apart from .dta. So, I used import function, got the data, saved it and now I can use the same data on STATA 19 SE. Thanks all for your help and inputs.
But I really feel accessing data on different versions of STATA should not be an impediment. I could open the data even in older version of SPSS but could not copy that in STATA (so used Import function).
Regards,

[Nick Cox]

help describe

explains how to get descriptive information before you use a dataset.