Using Microsoft Excel to improve efficiency in working with large datasets in Stata

There is an ongoing growth in the availability of data and increased number of variables in large datasets such as medical claim files or national surveys. Stata supports various descriptive, exploratory, and analytical approaches to work with these data to identify and study various topics such as public and clinical health outcomes and issues. Given the high volume of various data generated daily, implementing cross-platform approaches to manage and manipulate data can improve efficiency of data-science professionals and academic researchers. The aim of this presentation is to use Microsoft Excel jointly with Stata to facilitate data governance and manipulation in large-scale datasets. Method: This presentation will focus on three different ways that Excel can be used as a supportive tool to facilitate and expedite the data manipulation, analysis, interpretation, and reporting in Stata, with a focus on large datasets with many variables. First, Excel will be used as an interactive data dictionary tool to select and keep track of variables included in various analysis stages. Second, Excel commands and features will be used to generate batch commands to perform repeated variable transformation and conditional data manipulation or analysis in Stata. Finally, Stata output tables will be imported to Excel to further customize preparation and reporting. Each of these three categories of tasks will be supported by at least one example from a dataset with many variables. Conclusion: Using Microsoft Excel features and commands jointly with Stata can benefit data scientists and researchers by improving efficiency and productivity through saving time and providing a comprehensive picture of a dataset.