Hi:
If you wanted to format HEIGHT, you would use a FORMAT statement in a procedure that used FORMAT statements, such as:
[pre]
format height
fmt-name.;
[/pre]
For percentages, you have to know ahead of time whether the number has been multiplied by 100 or not. For example -- let's say you have a variable called PCTVAL with a number like .3456 -- the SAS pre-defined PERCENT format would do an automatic multiply by 100 -- so the number could display as 34% or 34.56% depending on your format: PERCENT8.0 or PERCENT8.2 (this means you have to know what your number looks like). Your FORMAT statement would be:
[pre]format PCTVAL percent8.2;[/pre]
If your number had already been multiplied by 100 and was stored as 34.56, then you would NOT want to use the pre-defined PERCENT format. In order to just attach a percent sign without doing the multiply by 100, you would need to define your own PICTURE format, as described here (and in previous forum postings):
http://support.sas.com/kb/36/495.html
(the note talks about using a PICTURE format with PROC TABULATE because that is a procedure that calculates percents, but automatically does a multiply by 100)
To use a PICTURE format, such as the one described in the Tech Support note, you would, again, use a FORMAT statement:
[pre]format PCTVAL mypct.;[/pre]
As to whether you should use PROC PRINT or PROC REPORT it really is up to you -- PROC REPORT can produce both detail (one report row for every obs) as well as summary reports (one report row represents the summary of multiple obs); while PROC PRINT can only do detail reports; PROC PRINT will produce a sub-total and a grand-total; PROC REPORT can produce one or the other or both. PROC REPORT allows you to highlight an entire row based on some value; PROC PRINT only allows the highlighting of individual cells. PROC REPORT has the COMPUTE block that lets you adjust processing, create custom text strings at a break and perform conditional highlighting (such as one row with commas and another row with dollar signs). PROC REPORT allows you to put spanning headers in your header area -- PROC PRINT does not.
But if all you need is a simple detail report of your dataset -- PROC PRINT is quick and definitely easy to use. PROC REPORT syntax is a bit more verbose. If you were going to "pre-summarize" your data with PROC MEANS, for example and then do a PROC PRINT, I'd recommend switching to PROC REPORT because it can do the summarizing and the report in the same step. But if all you needed was a simple detail report, and you're just starting out, I'd probably recommend PROC PRINT.
cynthia