Why we created this repo

Three reasons:

1. Share useful ado files
2. Give a down-to-earth, practical how-to on git. As we worked with more people (some of whom weren't already using git), providing material and going over aspects of git became burdersome. So we created a unified repository with a lot of material on git!
3. Implement project functionality (project is an ado file that you can install with ssc install project. This is covered in our Wiki, but the general idea is that it allows you to use relatives paths, detect bugs in your code more easily and avoid compiling dofiles when there's no need to).

We realized that while project is extremely useful, using it forced us to write a bunch of extra code and modify it on the fly if we wanted to compile a single dofile, as oppossed as an entire project. Thus, we wrote a bunch of dofiles that make using project as painless as possible. Instead of using clear you can use our functionality init, as oppossed to save filename you use psave , file(filename), etc. That's it! This might seem a bit esoteric at first, so we encourage you to read the rest of the documentation and to check our examples.

Install ado files that we've found to be useful

Simply run do ados_to_install.do

How to use our repository and codes

Some of our codes can be installed directly from STATA's SSC. To install the part of our codes that deal with project functionality simply run ssc install pmanage.

If you want to have the most up to date version of our codes, clone this repository into your ado/ folder and remember to pull changes frequently. You can find the location of your ado/personal folder by typing sysdir. You can make your workflow easier and more efficient by copy-pasting profile.do in the directory where STATA is installed and modifying the parameters in that dofile so that every time STATA starts it discard old version of the ado files from memory and points to your appropriate personal ado file directory.

Read our Wiki

Seriously, we spent a lot of time coming with all those handy tricks

Check out our examples

We have written basic examples under ./examples/ that illustrate what you can do with project and the functionality that we support.

Contributions are welcome

Our base of ado files will improve the more people contribute to it. There are two ways to contribute:

Ask to join the repository as editor

1. Send an email to jose_jurado_vadillo@brown.edu asking to join the repository as editor. Please provide your GitHub email and username.
2. Create a separate branch with a descriptive name, e.g., feature-count-missing. You will not be able to commit to master.
3. push your changes into that branch
4. Make a pull request to master

Forking the repository

1. fork the repository into your account.
2. clone
3. Introduce your changes and commit
4. push to your fork
5. Send a pull request

(for more info watch this)

Directory of ados

• date2string generates a new date variable in string format
• esttab2 wrapper for esttab with commonly used options and project functionality
• evstudy utility to perform event study analysis
• graph2 exports a graph to PNG and PDF and optionally passes project functionality
• init starts a STATA dofile with commonly used options (ssc install pmanage)
• isorder tells user if one or more variables describe order of dataset
• merge2 merges to a CSV file, optionally passes project functionality
• mcompare multi compares a list of variables to a base variable
• missing2zero replaces missing values for a user specified value for a given list of variables
• pdo executes dofiles using project functionality
• pexit closes open log files, generates summary stats for verification purposes and stops dofile (ssc install pmanage)
• polgenerate generates polynomials out of a varlist and labels them
• psave saves to CSV and DTA and registers with project (ssc install pmanage)
• puse reads a DTA's, CSV and Excel files, and register dependencies using project functionality (ssc install pmanage)
• sumby produces summary statistics for a list of variables according to the categories of a specified variable
• timedummy creates time dummy variables. Best used in conjuction with evstudy and tsperiods
• tsperiods divides a panel dataset into equisized groups, with zero denoting the date of an event
• twowayscatter plots one or two-way scatters and saves the results
• uniquevals counts the number of unique values for a list of variables
• usstates given a variable containing the name of US states, return abbreviations (and viceversa)
• values2ascii converts some UTF-8 into ASCII