Stata (ˈsteit@, , alternatively ˈstaet@, occasionally stylized as STATA) is a general-purpose statistical software package developed by StataCorp for data manipulation, visualization, statistics, and automated reporting. It is used by researchers in many fields, including biomedicine, economics, epidemiology, and sociology.
Stata was initially developed by Computing Resource Center in California and the first version was released in 1985. In 1993, the company moved to College Station, TX and was renamed Stata Corporation, now known as StataCorp. A major release in 2003 included a new graphics system and dialog boxes for all commands. Since then, a new version has been released once every two years. The current version is Stata 18, released in April 2023.
From its creation, Stata has always employed an integrated command-line interface. Starting with version 8.0, Stata has included a graphical user interface based on Qt framework which uses menus and dialog boxes to give access to many built-in commands. The dataset can be viewed or edited in spreadsheet format. From version 11 on, other commands can be executed while the data browser or editor is opened.
Until the release of version 16, Stata could only open a single dataset at any one time. Stata allows for flexibility with assigning data types to data. Its compress command automatically reassigns data to data types that take up less memory without loss of information. Stata utilizes integer storage types which occupy only one or two bytes rather than four, and single-precision (4 bytes) rather than double-precision (8 bytes) is the default for floating-point numbers.
Stata's data format is always tabular in format. Stata refers to the columns of tabular data as variables.
Stata can import data in a variety of formats. This includes ASCII data formats (such as CSV or databank formats) and spreadsheet formats (including various Excel formats).
Stata's proprietary s have changed over time, although not every Stata release includes a new dataset format.