btable: Extensive summary tables in Stata

The construction of summary tables is a very common, repetitive, and time-consuming step in data analysis. btable is a flexible, easy-to-use, and powerful algorithm for generating such tables in Stata. It is freely available from GitHub. btable can summarize continuous, categorical, count, and time-to-event variables within one table using various descriptive statistics that can be individually chosen and combined for each variable. If the summary is grouped, effect measures with confidence intervals and p-values are added. User-defined effect measures and tests can be integrated. The table is constructed in a two-step approach using two functions: btable produces an unformatted, raw table, which is then formatted by btable_format to produce a final, publication-ready table. By default, the raw table contains all descriptive statistics, and, if grouped, effect measures with confidence intervals and p-values. The formatting step allows for variable-specific selection and formatting. The two-step approach separates data analysis and formatting. The analysis step does not change the current dataset, and the raw data table can be loaded, formatted by hand, or used for other purposes. The formatting step can be modified without rerunning the analysis.