Opening STER created in stata 14 with stata 12

[Ariel Karlinsky]

The Stata at my work station was updated recently from 11 to 14. my home station has stata 12.1 .
I use STER files quite often, running models at work, saving them to file and then at home outputting them using esttab and others.

This system worked really well till the update (see here: http://www.statalist.org/forums/foru...imates-to-file )
But now, when I try to access the STER files on my home station I get the following error message:

estimates describe using file
file is from a more recent version of Stata; you need to upgrade your Stata; visit http://www.stata.com/
r(610);

Is there any command (user written or otherwise) to deal with this? something simmilar to use13 perhaps?
Also I must say that I knew that dta files in Stata 14 are incompatible with older versions (due to unicode among others), but just as do files are compatible across I thought STER files were compatible across as well...

Any help would be much appreciated

[Ariel Karlinsky]

I found this thread and see that no solution was found then, I wonder if it's different now:
http://www.statalist.org/forums/foru...sions-of-stata

Also, perhaps there's a solution where instead of making older versions of stata open files created by newer versions of stata, there's a command within stata 14 to save STER files such that it can be opened by stata 11? (similar to saveold, as mentioned in the thread I linked to)

[wbuchanan]

Ariel Karlinsky It's a bit difficult to figure out how the file is being serialized/deserialized, but it shouldn't be difficult to store the results in a different format some how. The change becomes being flexible enough to store any type of results and having them get read back into Stata as results returned from an estimation command. I had never heard of these files prior to this thread, but it is definitely an interesting thing to consider.

[Ariel Karlinsky]

STER files are what's being created by:

estimates save

How do you store estimation results so they can be accessible post stata session?

[wbuchanan]

Ariel Karlinsky I've actually never had a use case for it to be honest. Typically I would just execute the program again or run a script again to do that, but I can see how it would be useful. If there was an easy way to get the list of macros, scalars, and matrices that have the returned results then saving/storing might not be difficult (at least to move the data to disk and back), but getting the appropriate functionality (e.g., being able to call margins when the vector e(b) and matrix e(V) are available) would be a bit more difficult.

[Alex Mitrani]

Michael Blasnik's command estsave did the trick for me. It saves the estimation results as a variable to the dataset, which can be saved to an older format using saveold. At the other end, open .dta, use estsave to read the estimation results and estimates save to save them to the official .ster format.