Stata has such an extensive collection of features for data management, graphics, statistics, and reporting that it can seem a little intimidating at first. Fortunately, Stata has two commands that will help you quickly learn what you need to know: help and search.
When in doubt, just type help in the Command window.
. help
A Viewer window will open and display advice on finding help. This advice begins with a discussion of the search command.
The search command searches a keyword database and the Internet for Stata materials related to your query. For example, I could search for information about probit regression by typing search probit regression.
. search probit regression
A Viewer window will open and display a list of links to help files, manual entries, frequently asked questions (FAQs), examples, Stata Journal articles, YouTube videos, blog posts, and other resources.
Stata's help files and PDF manuals are installed locally on your computer. Other resources will require an Internet connection. You can restrict your search to the Stata PDF manuals by using the manual option.
. search probit regression, manual
The second entry in the list of results displays help probit, and the word "probit" is a blue, clickable link. Clicking on the link will take you to the help file for Stata's probit command. The help file includes a section that describes the syntax, the location of the command in Stata's menu, a description of the probit command, links to the PDF documentation, details about the options, worked examples, video examples with links to the Stata YouTube channel, and a list of stored results.
A clickable link at the top of the help file says "View complete PDF manual entry". The PDF manual entry contains even more detail about the probit command, and there is a list of clickable links to the various sections at the top of the entry. These sections include Description, Menu, Syntax, Quick start, Options, Remarks and examples, Stored results, Methods and formulas, References, and Also see.
Once you become familiar with Stata, you may prefer to use the help command to look up specific commands. For example, you could learn more about Stata's probit command by typing help probit.
. help probit
This will take you directly to the help file for the probit command.
There are many other resources on the Internet to help you learn more about Stata. You can type help resources to view a list of these resources.
. help resources
You can watch a demonstration of these commands by clicking on the link to the YouTube videos below. You can read more about these commands by clicking on the links to the Stata manual entries below.
Read more in the Stata Base Reference Manual; see [R] help and [R] search.
