Is there a way to do something like the following?
Export the contents of the Variable window, or better yet the
information yielded by the "describe" command, to a tab-delimited text file.
(Note that the contents of Review window can be easily extracted by
right-clicking that window, but that right-clicking the Variable window
does not permit the same operation.)
The idea is to get a spreadsheet with a row for each variable and with
at least the following two columns:
the name of the variable
explanation of what the variable represents.
and ideally also the following columns:
Storage type
Display format
Value label
My reason for wanting to export this information, rather than just looking
at it in the Results or Variable windows, is so that I can browse through
it, search in it (e.g., find all variables with "ffr" in their name),
and add other fields such as a column that simply numbers the variables
consecutively.
You should probably use the -descsave- package, downloadable from SSC,
which produces an output dataset (or resultsset) with 1 observation per
variable and data on the variable's order in the original dataset, name,
storage type, format, value label, variable label and (optionally)
characteristics. Having produced the resultsset, you can input it into
memory using the -use- command and export it to a spreadsheet using the
-outsheet- command. In Stata, type
