Connecting Stata and Microsoft Word using StatTag for collaborative reproducibility

Although Stata can render output and reports to Microsoft Word, pdf and html files, Stata users must sometimes transcribe statistical content in to separate Microsoft Word documents (for example, documents drafted by colleagues in Word or documents that must be prepared in Word), a process that is error prone, irreproducible, and inefficient. This talk will illustrate how StatTag (www.stattag.org), an open source, free, and user-friendly program that we developed, addresses this problem. Since its introduction in 2016, StatTag has undergone substantial improvements and refinements. StatTag establishes a bidirectional link between Stata files and a Word document and supports a reproducible pipeline even when (1) statistical results must be included and updated in Word documents that were never generated from Stata; and (2) text in Word files generated from Stata has departed substantially from original content, for example, through tracked changes or comments. We will demonstrate how to use StatTag to connect Stata and Word files so that all files can be edited separately, but statistical content—values, tables, figures, and verbatim output—can be updated automatically in Word. Using practical examples, we will also illustrate how to use StatTag to view, edit, and rerun Stata code directly from Word.