How to Export Cross Tabs into Excel (Open Office Libre)

[Sabrina Nasir]

Hi everyone,

I have the most recent version of Stata and I am running a lengthy cross-tab with two variables.

Is there a way to export this data into OpenOffice Libre (the free version of "Excel")?

I know there are commands that export it into an Excel sheet...such as PutExcel

Any advice or tips are greatly appreciated!

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

Stata supports creating Office Open XML. This is the open standard XML format supported by Microsoft. LibreOffice (and it's Apache counterpart) should both support reading and saving this version OOXML files. Ther are occasional differences I've found between how LibreOffce interprets files versus Microsoft, but this applies to docx files.

To answer your direct question, there are many ways to export cross-tabs to Excel files. One official way is to use -table- and the new -collect- system. See -help table- and -help collect intro-.

Other possibilities from user created programs exist. -tab2xl-, -asdoc-, etc.

[William Lisowski]

Adding something implicit in what Leonardo Guizzetti wrote, the xlsx files created by Stata or Excel are in the OpenOffice spreadsheet format, and should be able to be opened directly by LibreOffice Calc, although perhaps the Excel suffix on the file (.xlsx) may need to be changed to the LibreOffice Calc suffix (.ods) to be able to double-click on the file and have it open in LibreOffice Calc.

I think. I'm not a LibreOffice user at the current time.

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

A minor clarification/correction to what William said. Office Open XML and OpenDocument Format are different standards, though confusingly named. OOXML is developed by Microsoft as an open standard for interoperability with non-Microsoft products. ODF was developed by Sun Microsystems as an open standard, which is the native format supported by OpenOffice (and it's non-Apache fork, LibreOffice). The Microsoft Office and LibreOffice/Open suites both recognize and can create each other's standard formats, but Stata has gone the route of creating and supporting OOXML-based files.

[Sabrina Nasir]

Thank you Leonardo Guizzetti and William Lisowski very much! I am going to try these options now.