Speaking Stata: Problems with Tables, Part II

Abstract

Three user-written commands are reviewed as illustrations of different approaches to tabulation problems, each one step beyond what is possible to do directly through official Stata. tabcount is a wrapper for tabdisp written to produce tables that show how often specified values occur or specified conditions are satisfied so that, in particular, tables may include explicit zeros whenever desired. makematrix is designed for situations in which a table of results may be compiled by populating a matrix. matrix list or list may then be used to display the table. groups shows frequencies of combinations of values using list. Users should find these commands to be helpful additions to the toolkit. Programmers may be interested in examples of the wrapper approach, calculating the values to be tabulated before passing them to a workhorse display command. This is the second of two papers on this topic.