How do I fix this scatter plot?

[ballardw]

---

@AbhilashS wrote:

Hi Ballardw

Thank you for pointing this out. This is actually a self-guided statistics course with this data specifically being generated from the CDC website. There is no live instructor but I will try and email your points to the course creator. It has been a challenge as the tutorials do not anticipate problems like the one I have had so I am quite thankful to the help I am getting. 

---

CDC explains entirely too much. I've worked with a number of there systems over the years and as soon as they went away from fixed column data formats for text things fell apart. I have one project involving them where the data down load involves about 60 CSV files. The "program" they provided to to read the data starts with a macro to open all the CSV files and save them as XLSX files and then use Proc Import to read those. I started to write code to read the CSV and ran into the exact same issue of numeric values in quotes and it isn't always easy to tell which variables that contain all-numeral values are supposed to be numeric or are actually text ID codes.

[kristinsainani]

A simple trick to change this variable to numeric is to add 0 to the variable (and name it something new):

data NEW;

set OLD;

rate2=age_adjusted_rate+0;

run;

[Reeza]

---

@kristinsainani wrote:

A simple trick to change this variable to numeric is to add 0 to the variable (and name it something new):

data NEW;

set OLD;

rate2=age_adjusted_rate+0;

run;

---

This does work, but it's not recommended. It will generate a warning in the log about implicit conversion, so you're now used to seeing the messages in your log which makes it easier to miss other issues or to have them suppressed because you have too many notes/warnings.