st: Completely new version of -outreg-

[John Luke Gallup <jlgallup@pdx.edu>]

I would like to announce a new version (4) of the estimation formatting program -outreg-.  I have rewritten the program from scratch, making it much more powerful for formatting, and (I hope) with syntax as simple or simpler than the original.  

The new version creates native Word (RTF) files or LaTeX files, with as complete control of formatting as possible, including arbitrary arrangement of statistics, font and font-size control at the cell level, multiple tables in the same document, etc.  My goal was to allow the creation of a complete statistical appendix from a single .do file, with no subsequent format tweaking required in Word or a LaTeX editor.

I have been working on this new version of -outreg- on and off for too many years.  Actually -outreg2- grew out of an intermediate version that was almost completed when I realized that I wanted to make basic design improvements - Roy Wada finished the project and has been maintaining and expanding it since.  -outreg- is almost entirely written in Mata, with the tables stored in Mata string matrices, which solves the memory problems that sometimes occur using -outreg- with very large datasets.

The new version has the following features which I don't think exist in estimation formatting programs yet:

-  outreg can create any (rectangular) arrangement of 22 possible statistics based on coefficient or marginal effect estimates.

-  Addition of any summary statistics. 

-  Users can specify fonts and font sizes for each cell of the table, horizontal and vertical bounding lines, and spacing between table rows.

-  Wide tables can be placed in landscape orientation.

-  Cells can span multiple columns.

-  Successive tables can be added to the same document, with paragraphs of regular text in between.

-  Users can add footnotes or other symbols to any part of the table, with some effort.

-  Users can include Greek letters and other Unicode symbols in their text.

-  outreg can be used in loops, including writing to two or more tables each iteration (e.g. saving multiple estimates of first and second stage estimation to separate tables).

The new version can be downloaded with the command

. ssc install outreg, replace

Note that this will overwrite the previous version of -outreg-, with a couple of syntax changes which can make your legacy .do files using -outreg- not run properly without some minor editing.

Version 4 has been in use by some people for almost a year, so it should be quite stable.

The back end of -outreg- may be of interest to Statalist .ado programmers.  -frmttable.ado-, included in the -outreg- package, does most of the work, formatting the text and writing it to Word or Latex files.  -frmttable.ado is available for use by any other program by passing a Stata matrix containing the table data along with text for column, row, and other titles.

John


John Luke Gallup
Department of Economics
Portland State University


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