Cody’s Data Cleaning Techniques Using SAS® Software

Using PROC UNIVARIATE to Look for Highest and Lowest Values by Percentage

Let’s return to the problem of locating the “n” highest and “n” lowest values for each of several numeric variables in the data set. Remember that earlier in this chapter, you used PROC UNIVARIATE to list the five highest and five lowest values for your three numeric variables. First of all, this procedure prints lots of other statistics that you don’t need (or want), unless you use the output delivery system to limit the output.

If you are running a version of SAS software prior to Version 7 or you want to control the number of high and low values to list, you can write a custom program to give you exactly what you want. The approach is to have PROC UNIVARIATE output ...