This is in relation to your other question regarding importing data from Excel isn't it. You could save yourself a whole lot of effort by removing the two obstacles in your path - 1) Excel, which is an unstructured file format, 2) Proc import, which is a guessing procedure. These two combined will make your data garbage. I would advise:
1) Save to CSV file format, this is a text based file format. Save as from Excel.
2) Take the proc import code, or write it yourself, a datastep import where you specify how each data element should be read in. It would look something like:
data want;
infile "your_csv_file.csv" dlm=",";
length ...;
informat ...;
format ...;
input ...;
run;
Obviously the ... would be replaced by the lists of variables to be read in. In this way you can a) fix the data as it comes into SAS into character/numeric as you know the data to be, apply formatting - such as Genders, and do any other process, all in one simple step avoiding Excel "features" and proc import trying to guess what you want to do.
As a final tip, if this is Pharma data, then perhaps look at the CDISC models, by mapping to those you would put values and codes in the dataset so you would have everything ready for analysis.
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