I have been prepping my latest journal submission for the past week, and it
occurred to me that the ONLY thing that keeps me going back to SPSS on a
regular basis is that the tables in SPSS look far more polished than
anything I can produce in Stata. Considering that more and more journals in
my field are asking for "photo ready" tables, I find myself forced to use
SPSS in order to produce professional-looking tables. I have been a Stata
user for many years, but I find that I am forced dedicate more of my time to
SPSS for this function. I have even considered (Gasp!) switching to SPSS as
my primary statistical package for this reason alone...
Any thoughts out there? Am I missing something in Stata 8?
There is a suite of programs downloadable from the SSC archive to produce
tables that can be cut and pasted into a Microsoft Word document, or even a
HTML, TeX or LaTeX document. This is done by saving the results of Stata
commands in Stata data sets and then outputting these data sets to the
Stata log or to a file using the -listtex- package, downloadable from SSC.
There are other packages that can process these data sets to produce
better-looking tables. An account of this suite of programs is given in
Newson (2003), which is expected to appear in The Stata Journal later this
year, but a pre-publication draft can be downloaded from my website at
