Basic PROC FREQ questions

[grande44]

Hi all, SAS noob here. Any help or tips are greatly appreciated. I have a large dataset that contains information about hundreds of thousands of employees. I did the following to get the percentage of the employees' sexes:

PROC FREQ data=CPAGroups;

tables Sex/ nocum;

RUN;

This is the result:

These are my questions:

1. The 'Sex' variable is coded as '1' for male and '2' for female. How can I change these values within the  PROC FREQ step so that it displays the results with the labels 'Male' and 'Female' instead of 1 and 2?

2. How can I delete the 'Frequency' column? I am only interested in the 'Percent' of males/females.

3. Is it possible to insert a statement either in the log or in the Results Viewer that says "Women account for __% of employees.", where the calculated value of Percent for females is inserted into the "__%"?

Thank you so much for your help!

[Kurt_Bremser]

1. For the formatting, there's at least two ways:

- you can replace the sex variable with another (type character) that holds the formatted values

- you can create a format that renders 'male' for 1 and 'female' for 2 and assing that to the sex variable

2. use the "nofreq" option in the tables statement

3. I'd output the results to a dataset and do something like this:

proc freq data=CPAGroups noprint;

tables sex /nocum nofreq out=want;

run;

proc format library=work;

value sex

1 = 'Men'

2 = 'Women'

;

run;

data _null_;

set want;

format sex sex.;

put sex @;

put 'account for '@;

put PERCENT 5.2@;

put '% of employees.';

run;

[grande44]

Hi, I tried to use a PROC FORMAT statement:

PROCformat;

     value sexfmt 1="Male" 2="Female";

RUN;

PROCFREQ data=CPAGroups;

     tables sex / nofreq nocum;

     format sexfmt.;

RUN;

SAS returns the following error in the log:

186  PROC FREQ data=CPAGroups;

187      tables sex / nofreq nocum;

188      format sexfmt.;

                -------

                22

              76

ERROR
22-322: Syntax error, expecting one of the following: a name, _ALL_,
_CHARACTER_, _CHAR_,

              _NUMERIC_.

ERROR
76-322: Syntax error, statement will be ignored.

189  RUN;

On top of that, when I run PROC FREQ even without the FORMAT statement, it still shows frequencies despite my use of "nofreq".

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!

[Kurt_Bremser · Accepted solution]

The FORMAT statement assigns a format to a variable, so you need both in the statement:

format sex sexfmt.;

And you're right, the nofreq only works in crosstabulation tables. OTOH, the main purpose of PROC FREQ is the creation of counts, so no big surprise there.

If you want a heavily customized output, you're better off by creating an intermediate dataset and do the report from that. Like I did with PUTting the sentences into the log.

[RW9]

A further option (though remember efficiency is built into SAS functions - this however could be run on the DB) is:

proc sql;

  create table WORK.FREQ as

  select  case  when A.SEX="M" then "Male"

                else "Female" end as SEX,

          A.NUM_OBS / B.NOBS * 100 as PERCENTAGE

  from    (select SEX,count(SEX) as NUM_OBS from SASHELP.CLASSFIT group by SEX) A

  left join (select NOBS from DICTIONARY.TABLES where LIBNAME="SASHELP" and MEMNAME="CLASSFIT") B

  on      1=1;

quit;

[bharathtuppad]

data a;
input gen;
cards;
1
1
1
1
1
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
;

proc format ;
value gender 1="Female"
             2="Male";
run;

proc freq data=a;
table gen;
format gen gender.;
run;