New to SAS, need help with calculating average

[KyleS83]

Hi,

I'm learning base SAS programming at the moment. This is part of my SAS data set that shows the average return of stocks after a 9 year period from 20 different companies. I want to calculate the average of this variable (average of the AvgReturn). I tried doing mean(AvgReturn) but it doesn't work. I prefer not to input all the numbers so how would I go about this?

Thanks!



AvgReturn

11.24
5.45
11.57
-1.69
17.79
11.03
6.61
1.88
1.49
14.15
29.47
0.03
9.73
19.66
4.11
12.51
6.84
7.62
-0.64
0.63

[Pritish]

how about using Proc Means to get what you are trying to?

PROC MEANS NOPRINT
DATA = TEST_01;
OUTPUT MEAN=TOT_MEAN;
RUN;

[KyleS83]

The average has to be calculated Data Step, because after I calculate the average of the variable AvgReturn I have to compare the results to it

[Josh]

After PROC MEANS merge the output dataset back to the original dataset.