Have you ever wanted to create Word, PDF, or HTML files that report on what you have done? Stata provides commands for doing that:

Here we tell you aboutdyndoc.

You first create a file containing text to be formatted using the Markdown text-formatting language intermixed with Stata commands that produce the output you want in your final document. Markdown is a simple, standardized text-formatting language that you can read about atWikipedia. You mix Markdown with Stata commands that create the output you want. Think of the file you create as being a do-file on steroids.

You then rundyndoc to produce a Word document (.docx) or webpage—an HTML file. The resulting file will contain formatted text along with the Stata output and graphs that your commands produced.

The examples below on this webpage were created using that approach!

They are calleddynamic documents, which means that if the data ever change, we can run the original source document back throughdyndoc to create an updated webpage.

Let's see it work

Creating adyndoc file is as easy as creating a do-file. Here's one that creates an HTML file with only Stata output:

 example1.txt
~~~~<<dd_do>>webuse auto, clearsummarize price<</dd_do>>~~~

The four tildes in a row,~~~~, are Markdown syntax to start and end a code block.

Terms in<< …>> are called Stata dynamic-document tags. The code block is bounded by<<dd_do >> …<</dd_do>>. Stata code inside<<dd_do>> …<</dd_do>> is executed and its output substituted into the HTML document. We merely save the file above asexample1.txt, typedyndoc example1.txt in Stata, andexample1.html is created for us:

. webuse auto, clear(1978 automobile data). summarize price    Variable |        Obs        Mean    Std. dev.       Min        Max-------------+---------------------------------------------------------       price |         74    6165.257    2949.496       3291      15906

Let's add some text around our example:

 example2.txt
We will use the auto dataset. It includes variable price:~~~<<dd_do>>webuse auto, clearsummarize price<</dd_do>>~~~The mean of price is 6165. We will also ...

You can imagine what this document would look like. Here is a better version of it:

 example3.txt
We will use the auto dataset. It includes variable price:~~~<<dd_do>>webuse auto, clearsummarize price<</dd_do>>~~~The mean of price is <<dd_display: %9.0g r(mean)>>. We will also ...

To create the dynamic document fromexample3.txt, in Stata, we type

.dyndoc example3.txt  (output omitted)

The new fileexample3.html will be created. And the result looks like this:

We will use the auto dataset.  It includes variable price:
. webuse auto, clear(1978 automobile data). summarize price    Variable |        Obs        Mean    Std. dev.       Min        Max-------------+---------------------------------------------------------       price |         74    6165.257    2949.496       3291      15906
The mean of price is  6165.257.  We will also …

Finally, we can even add a Stata graph as an SVG file and someregression output as an HTML table to our document:

We convert the dynamic document inexample4.txt to HTML by typing

.dyndoc example4.txt  (output omitted)

and the result inexample4.html is

This really is a dynamic document. If the data ever change, all we have to do is rerundyndoc example4.txt to update the page.

Tell me more

dyndoc can substitute output, substitute results in-line, substitute graphs, and create tables from the results of some Stata commands. All of this can be saved as a Word document or an HTML file.

Read more about converting dynamic Markdown documents to Word or HTML in theStata Reporting Reference Manual; see[RPT] dyndoc.

Learn more about Stata'sreporting features.