SAS Certification Prep Guide, 4th Edition

Using Custom Formats

Overview

After you have created a custom format, you can use SAS statements to permanently assign the format to a variable in a DATA step, or you can temporarily specify a format in a PROC step to determine how the data values appear in output. You should already be familiar with referencing a format in a FORMAT statement.

Another way to assign, change, or remove the format that is associated with a variable in an existing SAS data set is to use the DATASETS procedure to modify the descriptor portion of a data set.

General form, DATASETS procedure with the MODIFY and FORMAT statements: PROC DATASETS LIB=SAS-library <NOLIST>; MODIFY SAS-data-set; FORMAT variable(s) format; QUIT; Here is an explanation of the syntax: ...