Load or Download File (Data Management)

There are a number of different ways to get data into Stata. And Stata can handle a number of different file formats. The way to load data into Stata requires answering several different questions.

Is the data remote (in the cloud) or local (on your machine)?
If the data is local, what is its location relative to your working directory?
What is the file format of the data?

Knowing the answer to these questions will tell you which of the many ways you will want to load data into Stata.

You can load data into Stata directly from a website. If the data is in Stata’s .dta format, you can use the standard Stata commands for loading data, just give it the absolute pathway to the location of the data on the internet. Install data from https://haghish.github.io/github/langlist.dta and then describe the data.
You can also download data to your machine, placing it in a specific folder, and then use the absolute path to load the data useing use. Download the file tenuredata.dta. Take care to note where you save this file. Then load the data into stata and describe the data.
Stata has a number of different example data sets that get download to your machine when you install Stata. Stata knows where these files are so one does not need to provide an aboslute or relative path when loading them. Load cancer.dta using the sysuse command. Then describe the data.
Stata can also input almost any type of data file and convert it to a .dta format. To do this, you use a compound command that starts with import and is followed by the format of the file. Type in help import to get a list of all the different types of files Stata can import. Download the file district_size.csv. Again, take care to note where you saved the file. Then use help to find the Stata command to import a comma-separated (the cs in .csv) file. Describe the data.