PowerPoint to Beamer, No Problem

Job market candidates use Beamer. It definitely looks nice. Also, as part of the audience, I really like to know how many slides and concepts remain. If there is a lot left, I leave my slightly irrelevant questions for after the talk. That said, PowerPoint is so easy! Especially when going back and forth with coauthors making changes. 

Solution: Jason Kirwin just blogged about a nice, easy way to convert PowerPoint slides to Beamer. Just click here. 

How to Avoid Making Stata Coding Errors

OK, I'm not sure whether they can be avoided completely, but these are definitely good tricks for minimizing how often they occur and spotting them quickly. Thank you, Tal Gross, for putting them together. 

My favorites: Use sensible names for variables and programs. Comment everything! Always keep the original data set untouched in a nice safe place. 

Source: phdcomics.com

Best Stata Tricks Twitter Thread Ever

Click here for the thread. Thank you, Seth Gershenson, for putting it together. Thank you, David Mckenzie, for bringing it to my attention. Grad students, study these carefully. Folks who have been coding Stata for years, you can also find tricks to simplify your life considerably!

My favorites:

If you're plotting regression coefficient estimates & confidence intervals this fine saturday morning, coefplot is the command for you.

binscatter by @michaelstepner: plots mean of y for different bins of x. super helpful for visualizing correlations, esp in big sample when plotting raw data yields a blotch of ink. also for plotting RD reduced forms & event studies. 


Enjoy!