Stata loops have helped me immensely in many different projects. From making datasets out of hundreds of different excel files to cleaning tens of thousand of data points in 4 to 5 lines of code, foreach and forvalues have saved me much time in different occasions.

I wrote a small article with the objective of offering a very brief introduction to help people who use Stata but are not very sure about how loops work. It’s called Making_Stata_work_for_you: macros_and_loops