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Displaying numbers in Stata: commas, decimals, and decimal places

There is an easy way to change commas to decimals and vice versa: set dp comma or set dp period It can also be changed permanently by adding the option , permanently. In order to set a limit for the number of decimal places, one simply has to set the format. For the list command…

There is an easy way to change commas to decimals and vice versa:

set dp comma

or

set dp period

It can also be changed permanently by adding the option , permanently.

In order to set a limit for the number of decimal places, one simply has to set the format. For the list command of a variable wage, one would normally type

list wage

which gives lots of decimal places, depending on the definition of the variable. In order to restrict it to (say) 2 decimal places, one would type

format wage %9.2fc

or (for using comma):

format wage %9,2fc

The result can be seen by entering: list wage which should display the correctly formatted numbers.

There are lots of other ways to format numbers. For a general overview, press help format.

To the best of my knowledge, this formats are not directly applicable to statistics like sum or regression output. Check the blog-entries for exporting this information. Many export commands support formatting of numbers (see e.g. here).

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