Simple Problems, Simple Solutions

While I should have known this years ago, better late than never.

As one becomes familiar with the broad descriptive contours of new data, the tab function is both well-known and ubiquitous. Finding analogous basic descriptive statistics for sub-samples, while certainly possible, was typically (for me, anyway) a bit cumbersome with the tab command.

A recent discussion on the StataList, however, introduced me to the simple (and code-saving) power of a related command, tabstat. As this discussion illustrates (click here), what the tab command accomplishes with multiple lines of coding and multiple output tables, the tabstat command, by contrast, accomplishes with a single line of code and a single, unified output table.