Hi SMorrison07 A date variable in SAS is just another numeric variable. To be meaningful as a date the value is defined as the number of days between January 1st 1960 and the date the value is representing. Therefore is you take your existing numeric value of the year 2000 and try to use it as a date (e.g. in a date function or formatted for display) this will represent 2000 days from January 1st 1960, which is somewhere in 1965 🙂 To 'convert' it to a date you need to convert it to an appropriate number of days. This is what the function mdy is doing in Linlin's response. This function takes 3 arguments: months, days, years. As you only have the year, you need to decide at what point during that year you want to represent the date, e.g. beginning, middle, end, or any other point you choose. You can then use your modified value with date formats or functions as you like. Hope that helps ... View more

As already mentioned, there is a difference between significant digits (as in the title of your question) and the number of decimal places (as in the body of your question). My thoughts on this are that you need to know something about the data in order to determine how many significant digits should be used, regardless of how many decimals have been entered. However, if you do actually want to count decimal places and the field is numeric, I would query the entire dataset and take the maximum decimal places seen across all related records. ... View more