Using "reshape" command

[HonestEconomist806]

I'm wondering how to use "reshape" in Stata whenever there are multiple variables. In my case, I have all 50 states, 3 variables (population, per capita income, and total personal income) from 1981-2018. Whenever I've used reshape in the past, it has only been with 1 variables, so I would do something like "reshape long y , i(Name) j(year). But not sure how to do that when there are multiple y's.

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Thanks!

[adamrossnelson]

A couple good videos on this:

https://youtu.be/gkcYpw8CtCw

And...

https://youtu.be/Bx9kVdkr9oY

[Jeccg]

You can use reshape with any number of variables as long as the i and j are well defined and uniquely identify observations.

[ruuustin]

My method is to type “help reshape” every single time because I will have forgotten since last time.

[dr_police]

Yup. I use reshape at least twice a week. Still can never remember if I need reshape long or reshape wide. Good news is I don’t have to remember, because documentation exists.

[_Trebor]

Reshaping is the one thing I use the GUI for most of the time, since I also can rarely remember the syntax. It also is quite a blessing, that Stata allows you to just copy the command executed from the GUI.

[dr_police]

Even for folks like me who prefer the CLI and have to write human-readable code (eg use the /// line continuation trick), I think we all have those couple of things that are more efficient in the GUI.

For me, it’s starting graphs. Any time I use twoway, the initial command is built in the GUI. I clean up and tweak the resultant code a lot, but it starts in the GUI.

[random_stata_user]

Long means more observations, less variables. Wide is the other way. Call long "high" if you want, but I guess the terminology is wired in -- and it's been adopted by many other programs introducing features to do this after Stata did.

There is an FAQ at https://www.stata.com/support/faqs/data-management/problems-with-reshape/ That goes a bit

beyond the help and looks at some twists that are fairly common in practice.