Make it easy with valuable commands in Stata: dtable and collect

Preparing publication-ready tables of results has been a constant workload for Stata users. Designing tables in a standardized format for reports or slides is time-consuming. The new version of Stata 18 includes a couple of commands long awaited by the scientific community: collect and dtable. The dtable command creates tables of descriptive statistics, commonly known as a “Table 1”. Up to today, to build a Table 1, researchers had to combine several Stata commands or use a community- contributed command such as baselinetable or table1. Although these commands are useful, they do not have all the capabilities of the new Stata command. The collect command set creates custom tables, allowing researchers to design their own presentation styles. During this presentation, we will demonstrate how we have improved our lives with the dtable and collect commands in a heavily work-loaded Biostatistics Unit. We will present a Stata ado-program that allows the creation of Table 1 of a research study in an automated fashion.