@Glen_b ah, thanks, i forgot about that symbol. It was just to say "thanks"; the rest of my question was to anyone, so i guess it's just as well i didn't ping him/her. yeah, i'd never have noticed that it was not an "i". the chat has autocomplete for @, so i might have figured it out after a lot of practice :)

@Frank While I guess it's okay to ask stata questions here in chat you won't get much traction since the chat is pretty quiet. Note that you can also ask stata questions on statalist.org/forums or on stackoverflow with the [stata] tag (stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/stata ... as long as it fits within the kind of question that's on-topic there -- typically you'll need to show what you tried with a minimal working example).