Liz's Stata Guide

summarize

Produces a basic summary (number of observations, mean, standard deviation, min and max) of variables. It may be abbreviated sum.

Typical usage:
sum varx

Examples

. sum hhsize age

    Variable |       Obs        Mean    Std. Dev.       Min        Max
-------------+--------------------------------------------------------
      hhsize |      1088    7.493566    4.666816          0         35
         age |      1093     41.3129     15.4325         18         90

"Obs" is the number of non-missing observations for this variable -- even though our data set has 1100 observations, hhsize is missing for 12 and age is missing for 7.

Options

• The option , detail produces more detailed statistics.

  . sum age, detail
  
                        respondent's age
  -------------------------------------------------------------
        Percentiles      Smallest
   1%           18             18
   5%           20             18
  10%           24             18       Obs                1093
  25%           30             18       Sum of Wgt.        1093
  
  50%           39                      Mean            41.3129
                          Largest       Std. Dev.       15.4325
  75%           50             88
  90%           65             88       Variance       238.1621
  95%           72             90       Skewness       .7591179
  99%           84             90       Kurtosis       3.063381
  

Notes

• Can be very usefully combined with tab in the syntax tab varx, sum(vary)
• See the official Stata help for summarize.