Sometimes you can have blank cells & this will make it a string variable. Do you have some blank or missing values for this variable after "in-sheeting" it into STaTa? Say you have n missing values, then go to the bottom of your spreadsheet & delete n or more rows; save & try again.
Of course, as Nick points out, destring is another means of handling this.
Eric
>Hello all,
>
>I have encountered a puzzle and I hope you could shred some light on it.
>
>I am trying to load a large dataset (40,000 obs) into STATA, using the INSHEET command. The original file is in CSV format. There is one variable has only numeric values. However, when I read the dataset into STATA, this variable is stored as "str9". I try looking through the dataset and I did not find any characters values in this variable. Could you please help me figure out how to read this variable into "float" or any numeric format?
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Eric G. Wruck
Econalytics
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