Generate Time-series Bar graph with monthly data (MY)

[JINGWEN LIU]

I now only have two columns in my data Month Cases
Jan 2000 50
Feb 2000 79
Mar 2000 90
.... ....
Dec 2013 80
I want to generate a simple graph to show the change of monthly cases number

and I do exactly the same things show in STATA lecture in youtube. Generate new variable Month2 and declare time-series.
But every time i try to declare time-series.
All I got is.... Month2
3177m7
3180m2
3182m7
3185m2
3187m8
3190m3
..... And I generate a bar graph, which i think shows the right trend of monthly cases change during the study period...
but the x ais... is 3177m7 ..... instead of Jan 2000...
I donnot know what is going on.
I cant find answer anywhere...
Please help me...
Looking forward to your reply.

Best regards,
Jingwen from Uni Adelaide

[Marcos Almeida]

Welcome to the Stata Forum / Statalist,

Please read the FAQ. There you'll find information about sharing data/command/output.

Dealing with dates demands following some steps. I recommend to clarify what you did exactly(I mean, the command as well as the output, for a given data), instead of informing that a variable was generated, time-series was declared, etc.

This is the best approach to reap a helpful reply.

[Nick Cox]

What you've done is tell Stata that a daily date has a monthly date format:

. di %tm mdy(1,1,2000)
 3177m7

That change of display format won't change a date to another kind of date. To do that you need to convert explicitly as in

gen MonthDate = mofd(Month) 
format MonthDate %tm

or any other monthly format that suits.

[JINGWEN LIU]

Thank you so much ! even though I still not 100% understand which step I did wrong. but~ it worked !!!! Sincerely appreciated !!!!!!!!!!!

[Nick Cox]

More at https://www.stata-journal.com/sjpdf....iclenum=dm0067