Thank you so much for looking at this. You are right, I'm ignoring the missing values. What you and @novinosrin are proposing is more complex than what I just saw from @ChrisNZ, but the latter seems to work just fine. I don't know what it does when there are ties, my database is really small (153 observations) and I'm only comparing three variables.   I can't discern the idea from the code (yet) but I'll certainly look at those alternatives to get more familiar with SAS. Thanks again! ... View more

Yes! Works like a charm. Thank you so much! ... View more

Wow, thanks so much! It seems to work great for the observations that have three weight measurements, but what happens with the observations that only have two measurements? They don't seem to come out in the final output, data want, which has only two observations.   I'm going to try it with my own small dataset ... View more

Trying to clarify my question:  I have these data   obs weight1 weight2 weight3 1       53          54.7        53 2       48          47.5             3     67.4          68.5         69 4      48            48           .   The output I want is:   obs  weight1   weight2   weight3  finalweight 1        53              54.7        53          53 2        48               47.5                     47.8 3        67.4            68.5        69         68.8 4        48              48                         48   Where weight3 is a missing value the new variable is the mean of weight1 and weight2. But when there are three different weights, I only want to use two of them to calculate the mean. Maybe calculating the absolute value of every possible sum of pairs, and then asking SAS to compute the mean of the closest values? ... View more

Thanks for replying! I need to create a new variable that is the average of two of the values, the two closest ones. So where there are only two measurements, the new variable is the average of those two. But if there are three measurements (the third is taken when the discrepancy between the first two is larger than one unit), I want the average to be of only two values, the two closest values.   ... View more