My Friend the SAS ® Format

Abstract

The SAS System’s FORMAT facilities provide a diverse and powerful array of tools to work with and present your data. By supplying a range of resources to control how the values of data set variables are portrayed in your SAS output (i.e., your reports and analyses), SAS Format tools offer something for all SAS users, at all experience levels, and across the range of ways that the SAS System is used to report, manage, analyze and display data. Applying these capabilities to your SAS data sets, as well as the reports/analyses you generate from your data, enhance the visual appeal of your output, reduce ambiguity about the meaning of terms/definitions of values of variables, reduce coding and (depending on the size of the data set) processing time, and generally make your life easier as a SAS Software user. This paper starts with the basics and then discusses many ways you can take advantage of the many ways SAS Formats can be applied to your data, reports and analyses.