Matt, Many thanks. I was able to use my own data set by using the saveold command on stata At least now I'm up and running, I'm sure I'll be in touch with more teething troubles. thanks again John ________________________________ From: Matt Blackwell &lt;mblackwell(a)gov.harvard.edu&gt; Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2016 7:56 PM To: John W T Megson Cc: amelia(a)lists.gking.harvard.edu Subject: Re: [amelia] trouble getting Started loading data set Hi John, I think the problem is that R and Amelia expects a Stata 12 or lower file, not Stata 13 or above. If you download the ANES data from their website, they should provide a Stata 12 file. For instance in the 2012 Time Series Study there is a file called "anes_timeseries_2012_Stata12.dta" that can be loaded into AmeliaView. Also, you can't delete variables within Amelia, but you can specify certain variables to be "ID variables" and thus not used in the imputation process. Hope that helps! Cheers, Matt ~~~~~~~~~~~ Matthew Blackwell Assistant Professor of Government Harvard University url: http://www.mattblackwell.org Matthew Blackwell - Home<http://www.mattblackwell.org/> www.mattblackwell.org Hello. I am an Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University . I am also an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 8:50 PM, John W T Megson <jmegson@purdue.edu<mailto:jmegson@purdue.edu>> wrote: Hello, I'm having trouble getting started with Amelia. I'm using Ameliaview 1.7.4 The data I'm using comes from ANES, in Stata form. When I try to load my modified data set into Amelia (via the import Stata tab) all I get is a "failure in loading data" message. I then was successfully able to load into Amelia the unaltered data set from ANES. This data set had several administrative variables, that did not vary, so Amelia asked me to remove them. Is there a way to do this from within Amelia? As after I deleted the offending variables outside of Amelia, I again was faced with the "failure in loading data message" So I guess I have a number of questions. Is there any reason my stata data set won't load into Amelia? Linked to this does Amelia only work on unaltered data sets? Finally, is there anyway to delete variables from within Amelia? many thanks John Megson -- Amelia mailing list served by HUIT [Un]Subscribe/View Archive: http://lists.gking.harvard.edu/?info=amelia More info about Amelia: http://gking.harvard.edu/amelia Amelia mailing list Amelia@lists.gking.harvard.edu<mailto:Amelia@lists.gking.harvard.edu> To unsubscribe from this list or get other information: https://lists.gking.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/amelia