[James Hassell (StataCorp)]

Leonardo Guizzetti

I am not sure this will help your situation, but you can resize multiple columns at a time in the Data Editor or Data Browser. Select multiple columns by either using ctrl+click to select one at a time, shift+click to select a range, or ctrl+A to select all, and then drag the right border of one of the selected columns. That will modify the size for each of the selected columns. You can even use combinations such as ctrl+A and then ctrl+click to deselect just a few columns.

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

Thanks James Hassell (StataCorp) , that's good to know and will help me out.

[Mark Davis]

I would love to see Stata's do editor add features from more advanced script editors. I currently augment the do editor by using notepad++, save the do files and call them from the command window. I still use the do editor because it allows me to easily run snippets of code. The advanced features I would like to see the most are saving all open tabs as temp files so if stata closes or crashes the scripts are available when I reopen, column editing, and regular expressions.

Adding the ability to merge to merge on variables that have different names would save me trouble, although frames makes it easier than ever. I would want syntax like

merge 1:1 var1=var2 using `file'

. I think this would be easy to implement because the equal character can't be in a variable name.

The biggest change I would like would be a completely new business model for Statacorp. I think they should offer cloud solutions. If you think of Ronald Coase's The nature of the firm Statacorp would lower frictions and transaction costs of owning and maintaining servers and sell stata as a service, capturing rents. Rather than buy and administer a 16+ core server and 16+ core stata licence you could pay for time on a server. I personally have a 4 core licence and a 15 inch mac book pro. I might be better off with a single core licence and a less expensive computer and occasionally paying stata $40 an hour to access 4-16 core cloud versions of stata. The trick would be in using stata as the client and not having to use some sort of VM client or forcing people to use command line based servers. The trick would be pricing in a way that stata doesn't cannibalize it's own licence sales, but instead captures rent from owning and managing servers in bulk. THe other pricing model would be selling users multicore licences and allowing them to rent server time on demand. I've had tutoring students that ahd do files that used so much ram that they had to buy new computers. I think there is a lot of room for statacorp to capture rents.

[Hua Peng (StataCorp)]

Mark Davis , thanks for suggestions. Column editing is available since Stata 15, or this is something more specific?

[Mark Davis]

I don't know how to @mention you but thank you. I'll definitely be using that. I missed this in the stata 15 release.

[Bruce Weaver]

Please consider tweaking -nestreg- to make it work with factor variables. This would be a great improvement IMO. Thanks.

[Bruce Weaver]

NOTE: This is a repeat from the Wishlist for Stata 16 thread.

Please consider tweaking -ranksum- to make it report (at least optionally) the Mann-Whitney U statistic and Wilcoxon's W (as some authors call it). Thanks for considering.

[Dan Palmer]

I second Mark Davis's suggestion to refine the merge command to allow for "merge on variables," similar to how this is done in SQL.

[Joseph Coveney]

The advanced features I would like to see the most are saving all open tabs as temp files so if stata closes or crashes the scripts are available when I reopen, column editing, and regular expressions.

In the Edit | Preferences... | Advanced tab, there's a checkbox "Always save before do/run", but I suspect that it saves only the current tab and not all open tabs.

Like you, I just found out (or re-discovered after having forgotten) from Hua (#19) that the do-file editor has column editing. I looked in the help file and in the user's manual entry and nothing is mentioned of column editing.

In the Edit | Find | Find. . . and Edit | Find | Replace... tabs, there is a checkbox "Regular expression". Would that be what you're looking for?

My initial reaction to others' enthusiastic reception of frames was, "What's all of the hullabaloo about? I've managed to get along quite well for so many years without it, I don't see as I'd ever use it." Now that I've played with the new feature a little, I'm beginning to think that -merge- is pretty much relegated to history as far as any code that I write goes. (Ditto for -preserve- and -tempfile-.)

[Richard Williams]

Please consider tweaking -nestreg- to make it work with factor variables. This would be a great improvement IMO. Thanks.

I would like that too. I would probably enter all the terms for a factor variable simultaneously, e.g. if you've got i.religion and religion has 5 categories, all 4 dummies would be entered in a single step.

Oddly enough, the old xi: prefix can do this:

webuse nhanes2f, clear
xi: nestreg: reg health (i.race) age height

[Jean-Claude Arbaut]

I don't think it's currently possible: copy one or several value labels from another frame. It's done if copying a variable, but I see cases where it would be nice to copy labels directly, in order to use them in another context.

[daniel klein]

I don't think it's currently possible: copy one or several value labels from another frame.

Sadly, I do not have access to Stata 16 yet. However, from what I understand from the documentation, this should be three lines of code

tempfile tmp
frame frame_name : label save lblname using `tmp'
run `tmp'

Best
Daniel

[Mario Ferri]

Bayesian Model Average (BMA) models),
Integration with various toolboxes ie Dynare, IRIS etc

[wbuchanan]

1. Native JDBC support
2. Allow mapping variable values to aesthetic properties in graphs (e.g., setting the color of scatter plot points based on a third variable instead of multiple calls to scatter).
3. SQL like syntax for intersections and unions of data (e.g., merges and appends).
4. Similar to what Richard Williams mentioned, I think performance enhancements under the hood could be great and would extend it to multi-level models and graphics too.

[Rasool Baloch]

I will suggest on #18 to Mark Davis, please try to -ssc install mmerge-. You can merge data sets with different names of key variables and also rename variables from using dataset as well.

Regards,
Rasool Bux