Displaying the lifetime of a deal (enddate-startdate) in a practical, intuitive way

[EinarRoed]

Indulge for a moment in the charming fantasy that you have a table with two columns, called DealStartDate and DealEndDate. Both are in the DATE9 format, displayed as for example 29AUG2012 and 02SEP2012. A mysterious stranger asks you to create a new column called DealLifetime, which should display how long the deal lasted (basically DealEndDate-DealStartDate).

How would you choose to display DealLifetime? As a simple numeric variable displaying the number of days? Is there a practical way to display the years, months, days, etc., in a single field? The format should be intuitive.

Thanks for your time.

[Jagadishkatam · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Hope this is what you are expecting, just separated the day, month and year. please let me know if this is not what you are looking for..

data test;

    input date1 : date9. date2 :date9.;

    format date1 date2 date9.;

    days_month_year=catx('-',put(intck('day',date1,date2),8.),put(intck('month',date1,date2),8.),put(intck('year',date1,date2),8.));

cards;

29AUG2012 02SEP2012

;

run;

                                                                                            days_

                                                                                            month_

                                            Obs        date1         date2           year

                                             1     29AUG2012    02SEP2012    4-1-0

Thanks,

Jagadish