Re: st: Top 10 Tricks in Stata (summary to date)

[Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@ND.edu>]

At 06:32 PM 5/23/2004 +0100, Nick Cox wrote:
> On Friday 21 May 2004 I asked
>
> Which would we nominate as (say) the top ten tricks which are the
> deepest and most Stataish features in what we use? What is _both_
> simple _and_ deep?  What leads to great results with at most a few
> lines of code?
I'm most attracted to things Stata can do that SPSS either can't do or that 
are much more difficult to do in SPSS.  So, I'll add to the list

* Robust standard errors (actually, these can be done in SPSS; I saw a web 
page that takes 10 pages to print showing how to do it.  I think just 
adding , robust to a command is easier).

* Robust regression routines, e.g. rreg and qreg.  There is no SPSS 
counterpart that I know of.

* More generally, Stata's internal consistency is vastly superior to 
SPSS's.  SPSS probably has 50 different routines, which look like they were 
written by 50 different people who all had their own ideas about what the 
best possible syntax would be.  With Stata, you can guess what the syntax 
of an estimation command will be and you'll probably be right or at least 
very close.  (But in fairness I'll add that several of my students say they 
prefer SPSS because they think its pulldown menu system is superior.)


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Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
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