Functions in Stata range between those you know you want and those you don't know you need. The word "functions" is heavily overloaded in Stata; here the focus is on functions' strict sense, _variables, extended macro functions, and egen functions. Often Stata users in difficulty are seeking commands or imagining that they need to write programs, when a few lines of code using functions would crack their problem. In this talk, I will briefly give some general advice on using functions and in more detail discuss a variety of examples, with the aim of introducing something unappreciated but useful to almost everyone. Somehow or other, graphs and my own work will also be mentioned.
