[Richard Williams]

You seem to have a very old version of esttab. Try updating.

. which esttab
c:\ado\plus\e\esttab.ado
*! version 2.1.1  10jun2022  Ben Jann
*! wrapper for estout

[Hua Peng (StataCorp)]

I agree with Richard.

[Richard Williams]

My suggestion for any error without an obvious cause: Before putting a lot of time into figuring out what the problem is, make sure all software is up to date.

update all
adoupdate, update

If you are lucky the problem has already been fixed and if you aren't so lucky at least your software is up to date.

Incidentally I never delete old versions of Stata. I think I have everything from Stata 7 on still installed on my machine.

[Stephen Dorgan]

Thank you Richard & Hua.

I religiously and ruthlessly update all every week, just in case, but I have no idea why the old esttab version didn't update. I have used the code Richard suggested and:

1. esttab has updated to version 2.0.6 02jun2014
2. my do files now run within release 19

I enormously appreciate the

• Helpful suggestion from Richard to never delete old versions (Stata provided me with access to version 18 this afternoon, which I will be sure to keep)
• Incredibly rapid response from the folks at Stata. They were nothing short of amazing!

Thanks all.

[Clyde Schechter]

I religiously and ruthlessly update all every week, just in case, but I have no idea why the old esttab version didn't update. I have used the code Richard suggested and:... [emphasis added]

-update, all- updates the executable, documentation, and official Stata ado files. It does not update user-written ado-files. To do that you have to use -adoupdate-, as Richard wisely advised you in #18. That's why -esttab- updated this time and hasn't before.

Added: Regarding the advice to retain older versions of Stata on your machine, I think that unless you plan to write programs that you will contribute to the community, it is not necessary to maintain many prior versions of Stata on your computer. It is, however, a good idea to keep the most recent past version going until you have used the new version long enough that you are sure it is working well for you. In my case, that usually means about 3 months of using the newer version--during which time I probably will have made many runs of the commands and programming configurations that figure most prominently in my workflow. If I haven't encountered any serious problems, I relax and let the previous version go so I can recover ~2GB of hard drive space. Rarely, I will save an older version for the long term because something I did often in that version has been broken by changes in Stata's behavior in newer versions that I cannot reverse with Stata's version control. For example, when version 18.0 came out, the behavior of the -shell- command (for Windows) was changed in a way that made it unusable for something I need to do regularly, and version control does not bring back the old behavior. So I still have version 17 installed, and it will remain there for the foreseeable future, even after I (presumably) uninstall version 18.5 3 months from now.

[Richard Williams]

You may have gotten esttab from some place other than ssc. Sometimes things are on both Stata Journal and SSC or another site. My experience is that SSC is usually the best source but not always. A program might first appear elsewhere but the author doesn’t update it, they just update the ssc version.

i would uninstall est out. Then I would reinstall from SSC.

You might back up all your ado files first. There is a small chance that some change got made in est out that zaps your current programs.

Edit: A 2014 version of esttab is still pretty old, but perhaps new enough to fix whatever problem you have. But the most current version, as I said before, is from 2022 from ssc.

[Richard Williams]

OK, here is what I bet happened: If you search for estout, the entries you find include

st0085_2 from http://www.stata-journal.com/software/sj14-2
    SJ14-2 st0085_2. Update: Making regression... / Update: Making regression
    tables from stored / estimates / by Ben Jann, University of Bern /
    Support:  [email protected] / After installation, type help estout, /
    esttab, eststo, estadd, and estpost

st0085_1 from http://www.stata-journal.com/software/sj7-2
    SJ7-2 st0085_1.  Update: Making regression tables simplified / Update:
    Making regression tables simplified / by Ben Jann, ETH Zurich / Support:
    [email protected] / After installation, type help estout, esttab,
    eststo, and estadd

st0085 from http://www.stata-journal.com/software/sj5-3
    SJ5-3 st0085.  Making regression tables from stored... / Making regression
    tables from stored estimates / by Ben Jann, ETH Zurich / Support:
    [email protected] / After installation, type help estout,
    estoutdef, / and estadd

estout from http://fmwww.bc.edu/RePEc/bocode/e
    'ESTOUT': module to make regression tables / estout produces a table of
    regression results from one or / several models for use with spreadsheets,
    LaTeX, HTML, or a / word-processor table. eststo stores a quick copy of
    the active / estimation results for later tabulation. esttab is a wrapper

So, I'm betting you originally installed the st (Stata Journal) version and just now updated it, but the most current version is now actually on SSC.

I've done that too. Versions of my gologit2 program are on both st and ssc. However, the last time I updated on st, I added the line "The most recent version of gologit2 will also always be available from the SSC Archive." Authors can ask Stata Journal to update their software but I suspect many/most do not bother.

[Bruce Weaver]

Regarding #9 through #22, I don't think anyone ever mentioned that -swindex- is a user-written package. (If someone did, I missed it.)

net describe st0622, from(http://www.stata-journal.com/software/sj20-4)

[Stephen Dorgan]

Thanks. All you folks, and the collected advice, are all awesome...