From the course: SAS Essential Training: 1 Descriptive Analysis for Healthcare Research

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Alternatives to labels and formats

Alternatives to labels and formats - SAS Tutorial

From the course: SAS Essential Training: 1 Descriptive Analysis for Healthcare Research

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Alternatives to labels and formats

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- [Narrator] In this movie, I will talk about SAS labels and SAS format, and explain why we are not going to use them in this course series. First, let me make sure you know what I mean when I say SAS labels and SAS formats. Let's start with the term labels. In SAS, a label is text attached to a variable explaining what the variable represents. The label can be a long string that includes spaces such as "highest level of education." You will see that labels are already attached to the native BRFSS variables in our data set. We saw the labels in the PROC CONTENTS output earlier, remember? Okay, now I'm going to define what SAS formats are. Formats refer to text that is attached to each level of a categorical variable, explaining the level. So, if you have a variable where one equals yes, and two equals no, you could attach formats so that yes is attached to one and no is attached to two, that way if you run a SAS PROC that outputs information about the levels of the variables, such as…

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