All Dates on Data Editor Coming Up as .

[Joanne Parker]

Hello!

Currently new to operating STATA. My Data Editor does not show any dates despite me having dates put in on my REDCap. All dates appear as a period (.) Is there a way I can fix this to show like the actual date I put in for like dob?

Thank you!

[William Lisowski]

The period is Stata's indication that the value is missing. That suggests that however your data was output from REDCap (with which I am unfamiliar) and imported into Stata, the data was not successfully transferred.

Beyond that, your question really isn't clear without more detail, or at a minimum it is too difficult to guess at a good answer from what you have shared. Please help us help you. Explain how your output your data from REDCap, and present a small sample of the data. Explain how you imported the data into Stata. The Statalist FAQ provides advice on effectively posing your questions, posting data, and sharing Stata output.

Beyond that, some advice that I give to those who identify to being new to Stata.

I'm sympathetic to you as a new user of Stata - there is quite a lot to absorb. And even worse if perhaps you are under pressure to produce some output quickly. Nevertheless, I'd like to encourage you to take a step back from your immediate tasks.

When I began using Stata in a serious way, I started, as have others here, by reading my way through the Getting Started with Stata manual relevant to my setup. Chapter 18 then gives suggested further reading, much of which is in the Stata User's Guide, and I worked my way through much of that reading as well. All of these manuals are included as PDFs in the Stata installation and are accessible from within Stata - for example, through the PDF Documentation section of Stata's Help menu.

The objective in doing the reading was not so much to master Stata - I'm still far from that goal - as to be sure I'd become familiar with a wide variety of important basic techniques, so that when the time came that I needed them, I might recall their existence, if not the full syntax, and know how to find out more about them in the help files and PDF manuals.

With that background, for example, you would recognize that the "period" has meaning - it's not that the date is just not been displayed correctly, it's that there is no correct data to be displayed as a consequence of whatever you did to move your data from REDCap to Stata.

Stata supplies exceptionally good documentation that amply repays the time spent studying it - there's just a lot of it. The path I followed surfaces the things you need to know to get started in a hurry and to work effectively.

Stata also supples YouTube videos, if that's your thing.