To start Stata, click on ``My Stata'' (found in the Items for Student folder). When you start up Stata, 4 windows will pop up in addition to a menu bar. The most important ones are the command window and the results window.

You can enter data by hand or import it in from a file. If manually entering data you'll be editing a text file containing rows and columns of data.

Most of the datasets we'll use will generally be in proper Stata format, a form that Stata knows how to read. These files have names like filename.dta (the .dta extension tells Stata that the file is in Stata format).

Method 1: for use when the Stata object is on the Internet at a known URL address. Type:

use http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/wc/reg/elemapi.dta

The dataset is then ready for you to use Stata commands.

Method 2: for use when the Stata object is already on your hard drive. Just double click on the Stata object you want to open.

Graphics in Stata

To construct a basic histogram for the variable varname, type:

graph varname

Remember the names of all currently used variables, which came with the data set, or which you created, as stored in one of the additional windows Stata provides. For example, to graph price, you would issue the command graph price at the command window. A graphics window should open up. A useful option to the graph command allows you to change the number of bars (``bins'') on the histogram (the default is 5):

graph price, bin(10)

where bin(10) specifies that you want to use 10 bins for this histogram. You can choose a number different than 10 if you wish.

To create a box plot, type

graph price, box

at the command window. (We will learn more about this type of plot later.)

Basic Statistics in Stata

Here, generate some basic statistics (we will learn more about these later). Try the commands:

summarize

and then

summarize, detail

Getting Help in Stata

Start to become comfortable using the help facilities in Stata. There are two useful commands: search and help for this. To learn more about a specific concept (say you want to learn how to get Stata to make a histogram), at the command window you could type

search histogram

(you could substitute other concepts for histogram, such as boxplot or variance, etc.). Usually several commands are displayed; you could decide which command is likely to give you what you are most interested in.

To learn more about a specific Stata command (say you want more details about the graph command), type

help graph

(you could substitute any Stata command for the graph command; try it out for summarize for example).

Getting OUT of Stata

When you are done, after saving any work you might wish to use later (see handout on saving your work in Stata), type

exit

in the command window or exit via the menu. Don't forget to logout afterwards.

Saving your work in Stata

While working in Stata, everything you type and all of your results are displayed in the Results window. However, these results are NOT saved. The window saves only 500 lines of output. After that, they are lost forever.

The ``Save'' and ``Save as'' commands save only variable definitions. They do not save the output of any analyses. There are a few different ways to save your work, but the most straightforward is to cut and paste. The cut and paste method works for saving both text and graphics for later printing.

Cut and Paste Method for Saving Stata Output

1. Open up AppleWorks (or any other available word processor or text editor). To do this while running Stata, you need to point your mouse at the menu on the far upper right of the screen (it should now say ``Stata'') and select Finder. From there you can open the AppleWorks application, which is kept in the ``Items for Students'' folder. When it is running, you can switch between Stata and AppleWorks by using this menu on the upper right or the screen.

2. From within Stata, select text with the mouse (click on text and drag the mouse.) Then select ``Copy'' from the Edit menu (or hold down the Apple and C keys at the same time).

3. Switch to AppleWorks. Open a new document (from the File menu). Place the cursor on the page where you want to insert the copied text, and click once. Then select ``Paste'' from the Edit menu (or hold down the Apple and V keys at the same time).

4. You can continue to do this as you produce results that you want to keep.

NOTE: You should NOT use the ``Save Graph'' or ``Save As'' option in Stata to save graphs that you would like to print later from another program (for example, a wordprocessing program such as AppleWorks). These options create Stata-object graphs, which will only work if you wish to view your graphs using Stata.