st: Spss vs Stata

["Airey, David C" <david.airey@Vanderbilt.Edu>]

.

For Stata results you can copy as text, smart text, or as a picture. For integrating figures, text, and results window output, I use LaTeX. The SSC package "texdoc" works well for short and medium length documents, and the LaTeX package beamer produces nice slides. I produced summer short course materials using latex/beamer and texdoc (3 day temp url: https://files.me.com/dairey/c33i8j).

As you say there are several SSC packages for professional tabular output, like estout and outreg2. There was a recent Stata users group talk I did not see that is relevant here: <http://www.stata.com/meeting/boston10/abstracts.html>, that points to the validity of your complaint regarding official Stata. But Gallup's talk and several others like it at other meetings may suggest the approach to complex output is just different in Stata.



> Dear Stata users,
> 
> I've been using SPSS for 20 years. For the time being, I still use a
> six years old version of SPSS (12.01). For many reasons, I told my
> organisation that I would rather purchasing one licence of Stata
> instead of upgrading to the newest release of SPSS (18.0).
> 
> A few months ago, I've asked former SPSS users to write about their
> experience with Stata. Generally, people who have decided to switch
> from SPSS to Stata aren't looking back.
> 
> In order to learn the basics of Stata more easily when the software is
> installed on my computer, I bought 3 introductory books : A Gentle
> Introduction to Stata ; An Introduction to Stata for Health
> Researchers and, finally Data Analysis Using Stata.
> 
> I'm interested to hear from those who made the switch to Stata and
> particularly about the lurning curve regarding the management of Stata
> output. Generally, Stata seems to be far more superior to SPSS in many
> ways. But, in my humble opinion, Stata is currently far behind SPSS
> concerning how it displays its output. I'm aware that a lot of
> routines have been written by Stata users to customize outputs though.
> 
> Just in case Stata programmers were monitoring this list, I would be
> very pleased if the company decided to "improve" the output display in
> a future release. Perhaps, another possible feature would gave the
> user the choice between a "standard" Stata output and a Spss-like
> output.
> 
> Of course, I don't intent to start a controversy here.  Maybe I'm just
> an "old SPSS user" who is a little bit afraid to have to learn a new
> syntax ! : - )
> 
> Finally, I just want tell you all how much I appreciate this list.
> This is a very nice and vibrant community. I'm sure that I will learn
> a lot from Stata experts as soon as I start using the software.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Yves (Province de Québec)
> 
> P.S. Sorry for the bad English. I write in English just once in a while.
> 
> 


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