Stata on stackoverflow and other helpful hints

I’ve just answered my first question on programming Q & A website stackoverflow. I’ve been following the statistics tag by RSS for a little while now and this is the first I’ve seen someone asking a question on the site. There is, however, quite a following on the official Stata e-mail list if one ever needs to search or ask for answers to their Stata related programming questions.

Periodically one can find economics related questions using the statistical package R on stackoverflow as this programming language seems to have a greater following on stackoverflow. Although I’ve found the Statalist to be quite helpful in the past I’d really like to see Stata users move to a forum such as stackoverflow with better search and where one can use RSS to follow discussion.

Tips for finding help with Stata

Harness the power of Google

But, until Stata users move to a different forum for discussion I have two tips for Stata users looking for help with programming problems. The first is to simply use the power of Google search operators to focus on statalist discussion. For example, if you’d like to browse discussion related panel data methods for dichotomous dependant variables you could try searching google using:

site:stata.com/statalist/archive panel data probit

You can also use Google as an improvement to the default help search built into Stata by searching google. For example, if you can’t remember the commands for ordered probit estimation you could try:

site:stata.com/help.cgi ordered probit

Create your own personal Statalist archive with Gmail

My second tip is to follow Stata discussion using Gmail. First, subscribe to statalist using the instructions here. You’ll soon be overwhelmed with statalist e-mail in your inbox so you can use the power of Gmail to filter these messages. You can setup a filter to have all statalist e-mails skip the inbox and apply a statalist label for later browsing. You can also import the filter I’ve already setup to do this but you’ll have to enable the filter import/export feature in the labs section of Gmail settings. You can download this filter here. When you are ready to browse through some of the recent statalist discussion in your inbox you can use the search term:

label:StataList

You can also add further search terms to the above if you want to drill down discussion on certain topics like panel data, logit, etc. And, the real beauty of this tip is that you can delete the topics you aren’t interested in or use superstars/labels to organize topics you think useful. You could even tweak my filter to automatically delete topics you don’t like or send ones you do to your inbox. You may also consider using the multiple inbox feature of Gmail labs, however, I’ve found this method to be distracting and prefer the simplicity of a single inbox.