Thanks. This makes more sense to me.
Nick
[email protected]
K Jensen
To satisfy your curiosity further--I was presenting things here in a
format that would make sense in a typical Stata dataset. In fact my
variables weren't really "Age", "Sex" and "Weight" but more along the
lines of category identifiers. I was trying to get the data into the
format:
Individual_ID Category_ID Data_point
Then you could index by both Individual_ID and Category_ID in Access
and define relationships to another table with category level data for
example--which is a fairly standard approach in Access.
I was not unaware that--as presented--this was a pointless data
structure in Stata. I was just trying to keep things simple and not to
give too many unnecessary details. But I just ended up just being
puzzling!
2009/1/14 Nick Cox <[email protected]>:
> Thanks for satisfying my curiosity. I have never used Access but I am
> very surprised to hear that it requires this format. Be that as it
may,
> my not so hidden point was that your new data structure is, for Stata
> purposes, immensely inferior to the previous one.
>
> Nick
> [email protected]
>
> K Jensen
>
> I was using Stata to prepare data for a prewritten program--not
> mine--in another package (MS Access) that expects the data in this
> format. I suspected--correctly!--that it would be easier to do this in
> Stata than in Access. Access would require either a silly number of
> UNION queries or a VBA programming loop that would take many more
> lines.
>
> I am still lost in admiration for the neatness of Ulrich's solution.
>
> 2009/1/13 Nick Cox <[email protected]>:
>
>> Ulrich gave a good answer to your question.
>>
>> Could you please explain why this data structure is any sense better
>> for analysis?
>>
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
