Hi, You say that you think SAS is guessing character instead of numeric, what makes you say that, is that because of an error message? What method are you using to import; proc import, data step with infile statement, the Enterprise Guide import wizard or something else? If the data set gets created you can check the type associated with the variable afterwards, however if you define the variable with a length statement you will ensure it gets created as numeric.   Andy ... View more