Note that the above discussion involves getting into code nodes, and possibly stand-alone SAS programs. If you're comfortable with this, it's clearly the way to go.   If you want to stay within the EG tasks, I think the easiest option is to try to rearrange things to do each step for all persons at once, and then for your reporting use some kind of BY processing to individualize the reports.   Tom ... View more

Thanks for the info.   Dates/times are a royal faff between systems aren't they!   Unfortunately as it's SAS which is dropping/creating the table each time (we have an easy prompt-run EGP which pulls data, formats, adds info then drops/re-writes a table), it means getting Oracle to do any sort of converting/formatting is off the menu.   Appreciate all the suggestions but given this scenario, if I can't get SAS to do this via PROC SQL then I think I'll have to just live with it and remember to reformat everything when we use the table for producing reports!   Thanks for all the suggestions info though everyone! ... View more