The sad part of it is that that command by Marco Ercolani relies on Stata itself to be able to save to earlier format, so based on Alan Riley (StataCorp) 's description of the 'moving wall' of supported earlier formats it is bound to stop working. So the commands save9, save8, saveto7, etc, built on the same logic never made it out, although were also written. Unfortunately - save9- name was already taken in the SSC. Note that in a funny twist of fate it will create Stata 10 datasets even from Stata 9, but to read them back you would need to install - use10. However it has only been tested in Stata 13 and is considered beta. Save10's idea is to save into the 10th format regardless of the version of Stata, whether it's v14 or v24, because it relies on the knowledge of the internal structure of the dataset. Nice! This would be a great addition to save10! Note that Stat/Transfer was also simultaneously updated to support the Unicode conversions in version 13, and is always the shortest route for transferring data from package X to package Y.

Try the head on approach: start with label save, then translate the whole resulting file from unicode to an ANSI page, then reapply labels and save the data. Developing something like this by definition requires Stata 14, so will take some time. You just have to consent to losing the unsupported new features, and the rest goes into the file. Saving from Stata 14 to an earlier version of Stata should be trivial. If so, that would be very discouraging to reinvent the wheel, although still of a benefit for the users of Stata 10,11,12 perhaps. It was the case earlier that Stata 11 was taught to understand Stata 12 format in its last update, and I wonder if the same will be the case with Stata 13. I haven't heard anything on the maintenance of Stata 13 though. The format itself looks pretty closely resembling the older 117, but the unicode translations would likely limit the transfer from 14 to 13, not to earlier versions of Stata. But hey, it's not as odd as 7-byte integers! The rest was pretty much logically following from the previous format change. I am glad the most odd thing in the new format was the introduction of 6-byte integers. The task doesn't look like impossible though.

Obviously nothing can be done until the weekend, as I have to work my hours, and it is not going to be fast working without Stata 14 either. Javier, a few users have already requested - use14- privately.

Stata 13 datasets