how to understand the column(stat)？

[Eddie Pengma]

Dear All,

Thank you sincerely for helping me. When showing the table of statistics, I do not know the interpretation of column (stat), underlined below.

tabstat price weight length mpg, s(mean sd min max) ///
format(%4.2f) column(stat)

Best,

Eddie

[Jorrit Gosens]

You may find the asnwer if you type:

help tabstat

Or in this case, if you run the piece of code including and excluding the 'column(stat)' option, and comparing results.

[Maarten Buis]

There are two ways for you to find out for yourself what that means. First, is type in Stata help tabstat. It says that that option "display statistics in table columns". The alternative is listed as columns(variables), which "display variables in table columns; the default". That seems pretty clear to me, but if you are still uncertain you can try that command and see what happens, then remove the option and see what happens.