Thank you. This worked.  I do transpose the data from wide to long in the very next step.  I just wanted to create a summary variable (summing all 40+ variables across each year variable) before transposing.  Thank you again! ... View more

@ballardw Thank you for the tip.  I did not know this.  Thank you for re-writing the code as well. ... View more

@PaigeMiller Thank you, this makes sense - that dataset2 is being overwritten with the second iteration.  Thank you for that helpful explanation.  When I run your suggested code, I get 2 datasets, and each dataset has only 1 variable of interest, either age_2001 in one and age_2020 in the other.  However, I wanted both of those variables in the same dataset.   You are correct - I wanted to do the macro as a practice exercise and to save from writing out 15 extra lines of code (15 age categories for 2001 and 15 for 2020).  But it sounds like skipping the macro on this is the way to go.  Thank you again! ... View more