1. The first thing to do is to select your sample of banks.

In this example, I
used the following searching criteria:
- Location: Germany
- Entity type: bank
- Specialisation: Commercial bank, Investment bank, Bank holding and
holding company

2. Then, click on “VIEW RESULTS” (circled in red above). This is what you
will get:

3. Orbis provides you with information based on a basic template.

You can change this by clicking on the top right of the page on
“Add/remove columns”.
This is what you will see after clicking on this button:
4. Now, click on the arrow to the left of “Financial Data”. This will open a
list of categories of data from the financial statements of the bank. Click
now on the arrow next to “Global ratios” and then on the arrow next to
“Banks”. This is what you should be able to see.

5. Now, you can choose among different ratios related to the “Asset
quality” of the bank, its “Capital ratios”, its “Operations ratios” and its
“Liquidity ratios”. Let’s choose some ratios. For example, choose from
“Asset quality ratios” the Non perf. loans/Gross loans ratio and from
“Capital ratios” the Total Capital Ratio and the Tier 1 Ratio (Tier Ratio).
Let’s also eliminate some variable that we have in the data, such as “Last
avail. Year” and “Operating revenue (turnover)”. To do so, click on the
“X” next to that variable (circled in red above). You should remain with
the following variables:
6. Now, click on “Apply” at the bottom-left of the page, and you will see
the dataset with the new variables. Now, you can save the firms in your
sample, by clicking on the “Save” icon. Choose “Save as a new record
set”, and name it by writing, e.g., “Orbis 1” under “Name *”:

7. Now, export the data to an Excel file. To do so, click on the “Excel” icon,
choose the name for your file, and click on “Export”. If you do not have
too many banks/firms, choose “All companies”. If you have many
 companies, you might have to download data for a range of banks/firms,
because otherwise the dataset might be too large to export.

8. While Orbis is exporting the dataset, you should see this message box:

9. After a couple of minutes, you should be able to open the Excel file. The
file will have two worksheets. Now, we have to import this dataset into
STATA. It should be easier, as described at this link:
https://www.stata.com/support/faqs/data-management/converting-
excel-files/. But it is not. See section 5 “Common problems” at that link.
Basically, you have to “clean” the Excel worksheet a bit.
The first one is named “Search summary”, and the second one “Results”.
To export the data to STATA, I suggest the following steps:
a. Create a new worksheet – usually I name this “stata_data”.
b. Copy the dataset in “Results” (“CTRL+A”, “CTRL+C”) and paste it
on “stata_data” using the option “paste values”. This will ensure
that your dataset does not have any funny formatting that might
create problems in STATA. DO NOT USE “CTRL+V”, AS THIS WILL
COPY EVEN THE FORMATTING.
 c. Look for “Find & Select” on the Excel toolbar and choose Replace:

d. STATA doesn’t like variable names with more than one word. So,
replace all the variable names with more than one word with a
one-word name. It’s also better if the names consist of lower-case
letters only. For example, you could have the first row made up of
the following variable names:
id company inactive quoted branch owndata country sector consolidate npl tcr tier1r

e. In the “Replace box”, look for “.” in the first column and replace it
with a blank cell. Click on “Replace All”. This will ensure that you
can use the variable “id” as a numeric variable.

f. Now, open the STATA editor, and copy and paste (“CTRL+A”,
“CTRL+C”) the whole dataset. When you click on “CTRL+V”, STATA
should ask you if the first row contains variable names or data.
Click on “Variable names”.

g. You might have noticed that you have “n.a.” in columns with
numeric variables (npl, tcr, and tier1r). This is causing these
variables to be considered “strings” by STATA, instead of numeric
variables. In the “Command bar”, type the following command.

destring npl tcr tier1r, force replace

Now, your dataset is ready. Save it by going to “File”, “Save as”, and
choose the folder that you have dedicated to this module.
 NOTE: Downloading data for multiple years.

To download data for more than one year in Orbis, you need to click on the
little "wheel" next to the name of each variable.

If you do that, you should be able to see something similar to this:

If you click on "Absolute", you will see the actual year (e.g., 2016) instead of
the "relative" year. You can also choose the currency, as you can see from the
image.

You can choose more than one box:

It's not ideal, I know, and that's why working on Orbis is a bit more painful than
working with WRDS/Compustat!

But if you do this, you will be able to work with banks from all over the world,
and you can also use unlisted banks, instead of only banks listed in North-
American exchanges. Moreover, in Orbis many ratios are already calculated for
you (e.g. dividend payout ratio).