Clear and effective communication is an important aspect of statistical work, and one of the goals of this course. Dumping a lot of computer output, tables, or figures without explanation is not helpful to the consumer of the statistical analysis. For that reason, it is helpful, at the end of statistical analysis, to compile a report document that interleaves text, computer output, table and figures in a clear and pleasing manner.

There are many ways to accomplish this – some more involved than others. For the lecture notes and homework solutions (which are effectively reports), I use Jupyter noteboks in combination with Stata. I do not recommend it unless you are familiar with Jupyter notebooks already.

The easiest way is to use a document editor (such as MS Word) for the free text (your words and comments) and to paste Stata output and figures into that document. In the accompanying video, I show how you might accomplish that.

For more adventurous folks, I recommend that you look at the blog posts on formatting tables. You can create really nice, publication quality tables that way.

Stata also has features for creating dynamic documents that update using one command if your data changes, and output documents in multiple formats (PDF, DOCX, HTML) based on a single source document. See more on those in the Stata reporting page. If there is sufficient interest, we may cover it later in the course.