Formats

There are usually three scenarios when formats are used in SAS:

• To format the data available to make it more readable
• To assign a specific format to make the data more meaningful
• To alter the data type to make calculations, derivations, and so on

Formatting to make the data readable

SAS stores all dates as single unique numbers in a numeric format. All dates are stored as the number of dates from January 1, 1960. If you think of a number line, all dates prior to January 1, 1960 are negative and all dates after that are positive. It’s cumbersome to decode the numeric dates. An easier alternative is to get SAS to display a date using a date format. Let's look at our cost of living dataset with the addition...