Formatting dates: Daily to Monthly

[Isabel Lechner]

Dear Stata users,

I‘ve got a question regarding the formatting of a date variable in Stata.
I imported an Excel sheet with a date variable into Stata using the following code to import and format the date variable correctly:

gen date_birth =date(birth,"YMD")
format %td date_birth

In Stata the variable date_birth is now correctly displayed as

1 18oct2012 (corresponds 19284)
2 20oct2001 (corresponds 15268)
3 16may1994 (corresponds 12554)


I now would like to have these dates displayed without the day included as follwos:

1 Oct 2012
2 Oct 2001
3 May 1994

Therefore I run the following command for the variable: format %tmMon_CCYY date_birth
But Stata’s output is now:

1 January 3567
2 May 3232
3 March 3006

Is it not possible to just display the date in another format? Or do I need to reimport the dates to adjust the display settings?
I'm using Stata 12.0

Many thanks for your help!
Isabel

[Stephen Jenkins]

Please repost in the General forum. This is the wrong forum (as its title indicates)

[Isabel Lechner]

I just realized this mistake, thanks for the notice!