Hi folks! I've been googling and searching the site, but with no luck so far, so thought I'd ask. I'm looking for a good SUGI paper, blog post, site, whatever that has a really basic intro-level overview of writing a good SAS macro for data read-in and data cleaning (e.g. recoding). I've done this kind of thing before but it's been years, so I'm a little rusty, and I want to have a quick reference to share with colleagues.    Problem is, every macro program reference I can find online goes into one detail or another at a level far more detailed that what I need. They either go into details on how the macro processor works, how to do really complicated macros, or how to do macros that aren't for my context.   I'm just making a macro or "master file" that calls other programs and runs them in sequence. For example.    %macro check_and_clean ;   %include _lib-assign.sas /* Sets libraries for this project */   %include _contents.sas /* Checks number of cases data */   %include _subset-national.sas /* Subsets from national data to state needed */   %include _raw-formats /* Includes formats for the "raw" data */   %include _new-formats /* Includes final formats for the to be used in analysis */   %include _freq-check.sas /* Checks cat vars needed for analysis */   %include _means-check.sas /* Checks cont vars needed for analysis */   %include _weight-check.sas /* Checks weight vars needed for analysis */   %include _freq-clean.sas /* Cleans cat vars */   %include _means-clean.sas /* Cleans cont vars */   %include _combine /* Combines multiple years of data and weights making them ready for analysis */ %mend check_and_clean ;   Thanks in advance! Maybe I just need to write the blog post myself. 🙂  ... View more

One of the things I absolutely love about Stata is the ability to easily add notes and time stamps each time I create or modify a variable or data file. This creates metadata that travel with the variable or data file so that it's really easy to see the history of each item even if it gets separated from my own workflow (e.g., shared with colleagues). I've looked into proc datasets a little, but I can't see how to add notes to a variable. And I haven't found any good entry-level overviews of proc datasets in general. Are there any recommendations for such resources? Here's a link to information on how Stata handles it. Data Management in Stata See section 2.3.2 for variable notes Here's Stata's documentation.  It seems like it's a general function that works on both data files and variables. http://www.stata.com/manuals13/dnotes.pdf Thanks in advance and happy holidays! ... View more