Date format

[Jbraun]

Dear SAS users

I have a variable "Birth_date" with dates of birth. The variable containts numbers between 14316 and 36329. As far as I know the SAS date of birth format counts from the year 1960 so that jan 1st 1960 is "1" and so forth.

If I do a proc freq with a date9. format I get dates between year 2011 and year 2052. That doesn't quite make sense since the data should be covering current employees from ages at maybe 16 and up. So I would expect dates between maybe year 1940 and year 2000 or something like that:

proc freq data =NEW.Samlet;

format Birth_date date9.;

table Birth_date;

run;

Am I doing something wrong or does my data simply contain nonsense?

Kind regards,

Jacob

[RW9]

Where do you get those numbers from?  14316=13MAR1999?

Did you get the data from Excel, if so Excel holds date values from a different base date so the number is different.

[Jbraun]

Dear RW9

The data comes from an employee database and we use SAS primarily so therefore I was expecting the numbers to express a SAS-format. I thought that maybe the explanation was that more than one baseline-format existed in SAS, such as if a 1900-baseline was also sometimes used, then maybe that would explain the distribution.

Kind regards,

Jacob

[RW9]

Well there is:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/64316/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a000197881.htm

However you need to know what those numbers actually refer to.  I would also be careful about changing the option as it may affect other data's representation in the same session.

[Jbraun]

Thanks

[ballardw]

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@Jbraun wrote:

Dear SAS users

I have a variable "Birth_date" with dates of birth. The variable containts numbers between 14316 and 36329. As far as I know the SAS date of birth format counts from the year 1960 so that jan 1st 1960 is "1" and so forth.

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You might be interested to know that those example numbers will be 3/12/1939 and 6/18/1999 if treated as EXCEL date values which uses 1/1/1900 as it's base date. Perhaps the data base imported data from Excel but did not use or associate a date format with them, or the date format did not carry over from export or however you moved the data into SAS.

[Jbraun]

@ballardwthanks, that age span would definitely make a lot more sense. I will of course look for documentation to make sure.