From our first Getting Started with Stata posts, you should be comfortable navigating the windows and menus of Stata. We can now get into programming in Stata with a do-file.
Why Do-Files?
A do-file is a Stata file that provides a list of commands to run. You can run an entire do-file at once, or you can highlight and run particular lines from the file.
If you set up your do-file correctly, you can just click “run” after opening it. The do-file will set you to the correct directory, open your dataset, do all analyses, and save any graphs or results you want saved.
I’ll start off by saying this: Any analysis you want to run in Stata can be run without a do-file, just using menus and individual commands in the command window. But you still should make a do-file for the following reason:
Reproducibility (more…)