welcome to the overview of stata software this video will help you navigate around what you see
you can start data by clicking in the Start menu or clicking on the icon on your desktop when stata
first opens up this is what it will look like down here you have the command line this is the
place where you tells data what you want it to do and you will use a certain language force data to
understand after you type in the command and hit the enter key you will see the results come up
top here in this window and this piece here is called the results window now don't worry about
all this other stuff that's here now that's just introductory stuff and that's irrelevant for you
after you run a couple of analyses and type in a couple of commands you will see the results
up here and all this other introductory stuff will get bumped up so the three main sections
that you deal with when you look at the screen force data will be the command line that you
type in the words the results window above that that shows the results of what you typed and the
data sheet in order to open up the data sheet to see what's there you click this icon notice when
I hover the mouse over the icon it identifies it as the data editor and when I click to open
the data editor notice the particular data sheet that's open right now is blank it has
no name and there's no data in it now but there will be in a few minutes now right now you can
see we have two windows open we have the Maine State a window that has the command line and
the results window and then in the other window you have the data sheet you could always close
the data sheet and go back to the main part of theta just by clicking the red X in the corner
here I had a minimize data or restore it down to show you you're in datasheet view but if you click
the X it will disappear and you will come back to the regular view of theta so you can think
of the data sheet as being behind the scenes but I recommend you take a look at the data sheet after
every step you do in order to understand what's happening so to summarize you type what you want
data to do in the command line then stata will go to the data sheet in this case the data sheet
is empty but it won't be in a couple of minutes then after it processes your request by taking the
data and doing what you asked it will show the results back in the results window well how do
you tell stata what you wanted to do commanding stata is a language it will do what you want if
you say it the right way the words you type are called code they will go to the data get what you
want and then show it to you in the results window the commands you give stata usually do one of two
things you're either changing the data or running and analysis those are the only two things that
you're doing when you type in commands in the command line so now let's open up a data file
that was already made before this video so you can see how to open up a data file in data there are
three different ways that you can do this the first way is to double click on the data sheet
itself data will open but the data sheet will then be part of the session here's what I mean state
is already running but as we saw there is no data sheet let me maximize this there is no data sheet
right now the data right now is blank so what I'm going to do is I'm going to quit stata completely
now the data file I'm going to use is named pool non-numeric this is the result of a survey about
the East Meadow pool and how much people spend and how much people enjoy it and so on notice the icon
says dta which means it's a file specifically for theta so theta is not running if we double-click
Stata will boot up but because we double-click the data file when we go to look at the data editor
we can see our data about the east metal pool is here you may recognize this data from the previous
video the variable names have not been set so instead of saying gender and age and continent
by default the variable names are there one there to there three and so on now you might also notice
something else why is it that some variables have the values and brown while other variables have
the values in black when data is trying to tell you is that the variables in black are recognized
as a number where math operations and additional analyses can be run but that variables who have
the values and brown are recognized as words and non-numeric in fact even variable six which it
how much money people usually spend in the pool is considered non-numeric and that's because when i
copied it into the data sheet originally i left the dollar sign and if i left the dollar sign
stata assumes this is not a number stata assumes this is a alphabet character and unfortunately we
are limited to the number of analyses we can run now the second way to open a data sheet is use
the main menu so I'm going to close out the data sheets and this is what I mean from the main menu
if you click file open then browse the way you normally would for any other file in any other
software pool values only double click now you don't see the data sheet but it's there click on
the data editor and here it is this is a different data set this data set has the values as numbers
instead of words let's open up the other one file open scroll down pull non-numeric mix double-click
and now we're back to the original data sheet that we opened so it's very similar to any other
software when opening up a file now the third way to open a data sheet is the most interesting we
can type in the code and you may well ask how do we get the code to open up a data file well
the code is already there please note for any action you take in stata the related code will
show up in the results window look here in the results window remember the first thing I did was
double-click on the file called pool non-numeric mix and stata not only opened up the software but
opened up this file as well if we were to type in this code use and then here's the path and
the file the exact same result would happen and this file would be the data sheet for the session
remember the second thing we did was use the main menu and go file open and then we opened up this
file the result would be the same as if we typed in exactly this code so we click file open and
double clicked on this pool values only but what data did in fun is execute this command line and
it's showing us in the results window exactly the code that we could have typed in instead of using
the main menu and then of course i did a third one i reopened the file called pool non-numeric
mix by double-clicking on it to start statham i could have just started data and taken this exact
line of code click copy clicked in the command line click paste and then hit enter and then you
would see that the file we have so if we look at the data sheet right now you can see this is the
non-numeric mix that has the words instead of the numbers I'm going to close it out however
if I copy this line of code starting from the word used by the way don't copy the little dot here on
the end that'll screw everything up start copying from the first character after this tiny little
dot I don't know if you can see it all the way on the left but if I copy this one with the values
only into the command line on commanding stata to use the file that's in this path with this name
and then when i hit enter that is now the data sheet that's open to prove it I'm going to click
here in the data editor and now you see it's the other set of data that was in the different file