Automating the production of descriptive tables at Statistics Canada: mog.ado, a user-written program

Research at Canadian Social Trends within Statistics Canada, Canada's premiere Statistical agency, often involves the creation and analysis of numerous descriptive tables. These tables provide convenient and easy-to-understand information for the general public, one of our many clients. Analysis generally requires an understanding of what estimates are statistically different from each other. Statistics Canada's quality control measures require that any released estimates pass reliability and confidentiality standards. Both of these needs are often operationalized by numerous lines of Stata code after the use of a command, such as mean. This presentation is about a user-designed program, mog, that is essentially a front-end for the mean and test commands. It produces a fixed-width table of means over the groups specified. This table can then be easily copied into other productivity tools (Word, Excel, Open Office Apps, etc.) for any additional formatting and publication. The key is that the results are tabular and can copy properly as a table, significance tests of estimates versus a reference group are already performed and indicated, and quality control symbols indicating minimum sample size and individual significance are shown. I plan to present the amount of code to perform the tasks the old way, and thus time saved using the command, as well as the many options it has.