Hi. There's two good reasons for keeping date values in numeric SAS date vars, being calculation and representation. SAS Dates are required for the use of date functions such as INTNX and DATEDIFF and are the only valid values that are one "format away" from displaying a date in any way you wish. That said, you could actually perform the join without converting one of the key columns, if and only if, your merge could translate to a SQL join. Since SQL allow you to match by transformed columns it would just be a matter of finding the right match expression, maybe something like this: ... on cats(put(SASDATE,year4.),put(SASDATE,month2.)) = cats(CHARDATE) Cheers from Portugal. Daniel Santos @ www.cgd.pt
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