scatterplot with missing values in a panel

[John Andrews]

Dear all,

I have a panel data

xtset id year

scatter y x

but x contains some N/A values. and therefore I get an error message.

How can I skip this problem?

[Maarten Buis]

N/A suggests to me that x is not a numeric variable but a string variable; Stata does not know N/A, it only knows missing values: either a dot (.) or a dot and a letter (.a, .b, ...., .z). So if you import data into Stata that contains N/A, Stata will think: "hey that variable contains some observations with characters I do not recognize as part of a number, so I will import that entire variable as text". First step would be to see if this is really the problem. Type desc x (where x is the variable name) and look at the storage type. If it is str and a number or strL, then your variable x is a string. If it is supposed to be a number, then you can use destring with the force option to turn that variable in a numeric variable, and all N/As to missing values.