How to open a .dta file without Stata
Stata datasets travel well between Stata users and badly everywhere else: Excel does not read .dta, and an older Stata refuses a file saved by a newer one. Here any .dta from Stata 8 to Stata 18 opens in the browser as a table, with its value labels.
Free to use. Nothing to install; the file stays on your computer. Windows version — 4.9 MB, no installation: details. Pro — $29 once: price.
“Not Stata format” and “too new” errors
Every Stata release can read older .dta files, but not newer ones. Stata 12 and older show file … not Stata format (r(610)) when given a file saved by Stata 13 or later; Stata 13 refuses files from Stata 14 and later. The data is fine — the reader is just too old.
Ways out:
- Ask the sender to save with
saveold file.dta, version(12)(or the version you have). Strings longer than 244 characters (strL) do not survive this. - Open the file here: formats 113–115 (Stata 8–12) and 117–119 (Stata 13–18) are all read, and you can export to CSV or Excel and
import delimitedit into any Stata.
What you see
- Value labels instead of codes: “married” rather than 2. Switch them off in Parsing → File parsing (“Value labels instead of codes”) to see the numbers.
- Variable labels next to the names in the Fields panel and in tooltips.
- Missing values
.and the extended.a–.zare empty cells. - Dates with
%tdformats become dates and%tc/%tCdate and time. Weekly, monthly and quarterly formats (%tw,%tm,%tq) stay as the numbers Stata stores. - strL long strings — open-ended answers, notes — are read in full.
Text encoding
Format 118 and later is always UTF-8. Older files are in a Windows code page; files written into old formats by pandas or R are often UTF-8 anyway, and the app recognises that from the bytes. If accents still look wrong, pick the encoding in “File parsing”.
Getting it into Excel, CSV or another tool
Press Export: Excel keeps dates as dates and long ID codes as text. CSV goes into R, Python, SPSS or an older Stata. The view is exported as it is on screen — filters, column choice and labels-or-codes included. The free edition exports up to 5,000 rows at a time; Pro has no limit. For pandas and DuckDB there is export to Parquet.
FAQ
Which .dta versions are supported?
Formats 113–115 (Stata 8–12) and 117–119 (Stata 13–18, including files with more than 32,767 variables). Files from even older versions usually open too.
Can I edit the .dta and save it?
No, .dta files are read-only here. Export the edited table to Excel or CSV.
Why are some cells empty?
They hold a missing value — . or .a to .z. Stata shows them as dots; here they are empty, so averages and counts skip them.
Is my data uploaded?
No. The file is parsed in your browser tab.
Free to use. Your file is not uploaded to a server. Windows version — 4.9 MB, no installation: details. Pro — $29 once: price.