Stata Metadata
Stata offers human-readable variable names, variable labels, variable printing formats, and value labels.
Stata stores variable labels and value labels in a separate database. Many built-in commands seamlessly pull in metadata from that database, but there are notable exceptions.
Contents
Labels
Variable and value labels are defined using the label command.
label variable foo "yes or no?" label define yesno 1 "Yes" 0 "No" label values foo yesno
See here for more options.
Numeric values can be quickly prepended to value labels using the numlabel command.
numlabel foo, add mask("#. ")
Quick Tips
Stata has a number of interactive tools for examining metadata.
di _N // number of cases di c(k) // number of variables