STATA: file write or a way to exporting of almost anything

This is a bit of a repost, but it is so useful that I thought it would useful to people.

Ever want to get a formatted table of summary statitics exported directly from Stata? Outreg2 does a great job with exporting regression results, but what about variable means, variances, or other summary statitics. A great way to do this is with file write. This is a great command and provides you with a lot of control. Its simple:

sysuse auto
file open myfile using"C:/mytable.txt", write replace
file write myfile "Table of descriptive stats" _n _n
file write myfile _tab "Mean" _tab "5th pct" _tab "95th pct"_n
quietly sum price, detail
file write "Price" _tab %7.2f (r(mean)) _tab %7.2f (r(p5)) ///
_tab %7.2f (r(p95)) _n
file close myfile

Here is what just happened. We first open a file with the handle "myfile" that is associated with a text file "mytable.txt". Then I write a header on the first line. The _n sends a hard return, so I sent two hard returns after the header. Then I write my column headers, seperated by tabs (_tab). Then I write my formated summary statistics (%7.2f), again seperated by tabs. Note: you can send anything that is shown in return list or ereturn list so it is pretty flexible. Finally, I close the file. I have created a tab deliminated text file that we can open in excel or elsewhere.

When you combine this with loops and lists of variables that you can store in a local macro, it makes exporting standard tables very easy and automated. See my February 2010 post for a more complicated example.

Happy coding...