Stata’s Project Manager

I’ve recently become aware of Stata’s Project Manager tool. I believe it is available from Stata 13 onwards. If you’ve used RStudio Projects the idea is similar. It helps you to organize all files related to a project from a root directory.

I was really happy to see this line in the Stata help file:

We recommend that you create a directory in which to store a project and all of its files and use relative paths in the project as much as possible. You can then copy the directory to another computer, including Mac and Unix, and the project can be used as is.

Keeping projects organized and reproducible is always a challenge. I still consistently find things that I could be doing better, so it’s nice to have tools that already get you halfway there from the beginning. For practical guidelines for managing a project, this is a nice place to start.