thanks for this, but unfortunately the code that generates the txt is 500+ lines, so I won't give a sample of it (unfortunately it is under a user license agreement also). Basically, there is 100 000 or so lines with multiple columns. The first few lines of the program let you choose the output destination and format (so far .txt was the only output format that was readable). Basically, the input of this long SAS program is a txt file where you specify the character position of the postal code, and the position of the characters for the unique ID number.  ex:  @ 6 PCODE $CHAR6.  @ 8 ID $CHAR10.;            Once this is specified, the SAS program reads in the .txt files containing the postal codes, and then adds all the variables needed (census geographies), that correspond to the postal code, into a .txt output (specified by me). Now what I would like to do, is to add to this .txt file a simple column (same number of records) that contains the year of the postal code. So basically I have that year data in the same order, the same amount of records, it just needs to merged to that .txt file.    does this makes more sense?   thanks again, I'm new to this!                                  ... View more