[alejoforero]

The same way that Stata is able to know if data has been sorted before trying to sort it again, it should be able to know if data has been recently compressed before trying to compress it again. This should speed things up for large data for which compress is particularly useful.

[wbuchanan]

alejoforero knowing if it was compressed previously would also require rewriting any command that results in creating a new variable, since the new variable may not be storage optimized. It might not be a ton of overhead, but it would add a ton of work for the developers for something that may be easier for end users to ultimately manage.

[Clyde Schechter]

A frequent question seen on this Forum arises when a string variable is included in a regression command and the result is a "no observations" error message. While, in a sense, this is true, it would be more informative to the user if the error message in this situation were "string variables not allowed" or something to that effect, preferably accompanied by a list of the offending variable names.

[Sergiy Radyakin]

A very simple, but useful (imho) enhancement: I'd like to set names for Stata performance timers, which are only listed by numbers now.
https://www.stata.com/manuals/ptimer.pdf

Currently the output is something like the following:

. timer list
   1:      3.78 /        1 =       3.7840
   2:     14.29 /        3 =       4.7627
   3:     18.00 /        6 =       3.0000

I'd much rather do something like

timer name 1 "Data conversion"
timer name 2 "Data processing"
timer name 3 "Report building"

To get the output:

. timer list
   1:      3.78 /        1 =       3.7840      Data conversion
   2:     14.29 /        3 =       4.7627      Data processing 
   3:     18.00 /        6 =       3.0000      Report building

I do sometimes have 8-10 timers for different blocks of the code when trying to optimize performance and having a possibility to describe them once and list many times would be helpful.

[Kees Maat]

Copying a table with right-click + copy table to Excel does not work properly. Wish: improve copy table, preferably with an option to send the table directly to Excel.
The command -putexcel- is far too complicated.

[alejoforero]

Another wish for perfomance with large data: speed up the "clear" command: It becomes unbearably slow with large data (10+ GBs) and its even slower to clear data than to load it! There is some background task that is clearly not optimized.

(Windows 7, 10, Windows Server 2012, 2016)

[John Mullahy]

For Stata graphs it would sometimes be nice to have a single option that changes the look (specifically the color) of the axis labels and titles for both the x-axis and y-axis. E.g. instead of

sysuse auto
scatter price mpg, yti(,col(red)) xti(,col(red)) ylab(,labcol(red)) xlab(,labcol(red))

one would have something like

sysuse auto
scatter price mpg, labticol(red)

(I don't think such an option exists but if it does I'd be grateful to learn about it.)

[CJ Libassi]

Spell check for the do file editor.

[Clyde Schechter]

Re #503. Well, if it worked like the typical spell check in other programs, I think that would be a terrible idea. Have you ever copy/pasted some Stata code into, say, a Word document? The whole think lights up with "spelling errors" because variable names are frequently not correctly-spelled whole words, and many commands also are not correctly-spelled whole words either. To be anything but a colossal nuisance, it would have to be a highly tailored spell-checker that understood Stata syntax and ignored variable names and commands and the names of options in commands. So what does that leave to spell check? The comments? Does anybody really care about spelling errors in comments? What am I missing here?

[Ali Atia]

If I am understanding #503 right, this would be more akin to debugging support that is available in other code editors rather than an English grammar/spelling checker. Visual Studio Code, with the right extensions installed, is an example of this functionality -- things like variables which are referenced but not assigned, commands which do not exist, etc, are highlighted. The example below is some fake Python code in Visual Studio Code. For those not familiar with Python, the errors highlighted are as follows in order:

1. Failure to place a colon after the function definition (the correct Python syntax would be "def fake_function():")
2. Referencing a variable which has not yet been assigned (fake_var)
3. Using a library which has not been imported ("np" is a reference to the numpy library, which needs to be imported before use)
4. Another reference to a variable which has not yet been assigned (array)

[Clyde Schechter]

Re #505. Well, I myself am a Visual Studio user and I enjoy these features greatly. It would have never occurred to me to think of this as "spell check," but if that is what the author of #503 had in mind, then, yes, I am all for it.

[Jesse Wursten]

A very simple, but useful (imho) enhancement: I'd like to set names for Stata performance timers, which are only listed by numbers now.
https://www.stata.com/manuals/ptimer.pdf

Currently the output is something like the following:

. timer list
1: 3.78 / 1 = 3.7840
2: 14.29 / 3 = 4.7627
3: 18.00 / 6 = 3.0000

I'd much rather do something like

timer name 1 "Data conversion"
timer name 2 "Data processing"
timer name 3 "Report building"

To get the output:

. timer list
1: 3.78 / 1 = 3.7840 Data conversion
2: 14.29 / 3 = 4.7627 Data processing
3: 18.00 / 6 = 3.0000 Report building

I do sometimes have 8-10 timers for different blocks of the code when trying to optimize performance and having a possibility to describe them once and list many times would be helpful.

If you can collapse it to a single line you can use -timeit- on SSC. It supports "named" timers.

. timeit 1 regression: sleep 1000
. timeit 2 regression: sleep 500

. return list
scalars:
   r(delta_regression) =  .509
         r(regression) =  1.512
           r(delta_t2) =  .509
                 r(t2) =  .509
           r(delta_t1) =  1.003
                 r(t1) =  1.003

[wbuchanan]

Allow the use of strLs as key variables in reshape.

[Bruce Weaver]

I would like to see group lasso implemented in Stata. See this thread for additional information. Thanks.

[Fahad Mirza]

Would like Stata to read password protected Excel files. Maybe give an option for the user to write password in the code to streamline process.