Hi all,

Not my first choice of format, but I've got excel files of the following format for years 2002-2012. How can I most efficiently/effectively combine them into a panel?

They all look like this (you can ignore/drop the lrname variable):
state_name Male Female Total share lrname year
ANDHRA PRADESH 2218 448 2666 19.7 Andhra Pradesh 2004
ARUNACHAL PRADESH 16 4 20 25.3 Arunachal Pradesh 2004
ASSAM 316 15 331 11.7 Assam 2004
BIHAR 23 0 23 6.6 Bihar 2004
CHHATTISGARH 1213 182 1395 31 Chhattisgarh 2004
GOA 7 1 8 2.5 Goa 2004
GUJARAT 452 71 523 11 Gujarat 2004
HARYANA 144 16 160 7.7 Haryana 2004
HIMACHAL PRADESH 43 9 52 14 Himachal Pradesh 2004
JAMMU AND KASHMIR 1 0 1 0.9 Jammu and Kashmir 2004
JHARKHAND 21 0 21 5 Jharkhand 2004

And each excel file takes the path of e.g. Users/myname/documents/paper/data/dataset_2004.xlsx
i.e. the file for 2002 is dataset_2002.xlsx, the file for 2003 is dataset_2003.xlsx and so on.

Importing individually into stata, I use: sheet("sheet1") firstrow case(lower)

At the end of this, I would ideally have a panel spanning 2002-2012, which I would then be merging to another panel of different variables for 2002-2012 for the same state_name values (I'll cross that bridge when I come to it)