Producing Detail Reports with the PRINT Procedure

Making Your Reports Easy to Change

Base SAS includes the macro facility as a tool to customize SAS and to reduce the amount of text you must enter to do common tasks. The macro facility enables you to assign a name to character strings or groups of SAS programming statements.

From that point on, you can work with the names rather than with the text itself. When you use a macro facility name in a SAS program, the macro facility generates SAS statements and commands as needed. The rest of SAS receives those statements and uses them in the same way it uses the ones you enter in the standard manner.

The macro facility enables you to create macro variables to substitute text in SAS programs. One of the major advantages of using macro variables is that it enables you to change the value of a variable in one place in your program and then have the change appear in multiple references throughout your program. You can substitute text by using automatic macro variables or by using your own macro variables, which you define and assign values to.

Using Automatic Macro Variables

The SAS macro facility includes many automatic macro variables. Some of the values associated with the automatic macro variables depend on your operating environment. You can use automatic macro variables to provide the time, the day of the week, and the date based on your computer's internal clock as well as other processing information.

To include a second title on a report that displays the text string "Produced on" followed by today's date, add the following TITLE statement to your program:

title2 "Produced on &SYSDATE9";

Notice the syntax for this statement. First, the ampersand that precedes SYSDATE9 tells the SAS macro facility to replace the reference with its assigned value. In this case, the assigned value is the date the SAS session started and is expressed as ddmmmyyyy, where

	dd is a two-digit date
	mmm is the first three letters of the month name
	yyyy is a four-digit year

Second, the text of the TITLE statement is enclosed in double quotation marks because the SAS macro facility resolves macro variable references in the TITLE statement and the FOOTNOTE statement only if they are in double quotation marks.

The following program, which includes a PROC SORT step and the TITLE statement, demonstrates how to use the SYSDATE9. automatic macro variable:

options linesize=80 pageno=1 nodate;

proc sort data=qtr04;
   by SalesRep;
run;

proc print data=qtr04 noobs split='/' width=uniform;
   var SalesRep Month Units AmountSold;
   format Units comma7. AmountSold dollar14.2;
   sum Units AmountSold;
   title1 'TruBlend Coffee Maker Quarterly Sales Report';
   title2 "Produced on &SYSDATE9";
   label SalesRep    = 'Sales/Rep.'
         Units       = 'Units/Sold'
         AmountSold  = 'Amount/Sold';
run;

The following output shows the report:

Using Automatic Macro Variables

                  TruBlend Coffee Maker Quarterly Sales Report                 1
                             Produced on 30JAN2001

              Sales                       Units            Amount
              Rep.             Month       Sold              Sold

              Garcia            10          250         $7,742.50
              Garcia            10          365        $11,304.05
              Garcia            11          198         $6,132.06
              Garcia            11          120         $3,716.40
              Garcia            12        1,000        $30,970.00
              Hollingsworth     10          530        $16,414.10
              Hollingsworth     10          265         $8,207.05
              Hollingsworth     11        1,230        $38,093.10
              Hollingsworth     11          150         $7,425.00
              Hollingsworth     12          125         $6,187.50
              Hollingsworth     12          175         $5,419.75
              Jensen            10          975        $30,195.75
              Jensen            10           55         $1,703.35
              Jensen            11          453        $14,029.41
              Jensen            11           70         $2,167.90
              Jensen            12          876        $27,129.72
              Jensen            12        1,254        $38,836.38
                                        =======    ==============
                                          8,091       $255,674.02

Using Your Own Macro Variables

In addition to using automatic macro variables, you can use the %LET statement to define your own macro variables and refer to them with the ampersand prefix. Defining macro variables at the beginning of your program enables you to change other parts of the program easily. The following example shows how to define two macro variables, Quarter and Year, and how to refer to them in a TITLE statement.

Defining Macro Variables

To use two macro variables that produce flexible report titles, first define the macro variables. The following %LET statements define the two macro variables:

%let Quarter=Fourth;
%let Year=2000;

The name of the first macro variable is Quarter and it is assigned the value Fourth. The name of the second macro variable is Year and it is assigned the value 2000.

Macro variable names such as these conform to the following rules for SAS names:

macro variable names are one to 32 characters long
macro variable names begin with a letter or an underscore
letters, numbers, and underscores follow the first character.

In these simple situations, do not assign values to macro variables that contain unmatched quotation marks or semicolons. If the values contain leading or trailing blanks, then SAS removes the blanks.

Referring to Macro Variables

To refer to the value of a macro variable, place an ampersand prefix in front of the name of the variable. The following TITLE statement contains references to the values of the macro variables Quarter and Year, which were previously defined in %LET statements:

title3 "&Quarter Quarter &Year Sales Totals";

The complete program, which includes the two %LET statements and the TITLE3 statement, follows:

options linesize=80 pageno=1 nodate;

%let Quarter=Fourth;1 
%let Year=2000;2 

proc sort data=qtr04;
   by SalesRep;
run;
proc print data=qtr04 noobs split='/' width=uniform;
   var SalesRep Month Units AmountSold;
   format Units comma7. AmountSold dollar14.2;
   sum Units AmountSold;
   title1 'TruBlend Coffee Maker Quarterly Sales Report';
   title2 "Produced on &SYSDATE9";
   title3 "&Quarter Quarter &Year Sales Totals";3 
   label SalesRep    = 'Sales/Rep.'
         Units       = 'Units/Sold'
         AmountSold  = 'Amount/Sold';
run;

The following list corresponds to the numbered items in the preceding program:

	The %LET statement creates a macro variable with the sales quarter. When an ampersand precedes Quarter, the SAS macro facility knows to replace any reference to &Quarter with the assigned value of Fourth.
	The %LET statement creates a macro variable with the year. When ampersand precedes Year, the SAS macro facility knows to replace any reference to &Year with the assigned value of 2000.
	The text of the TITLE2 and TITLE3 statements are enclosed in double quotation marks so that the SAS macro facility can resolve them.

The following output shows the report:

Using Your Own Macro Variables

                  TruBlend Coffee Maker Quarterly Sales Report                 1
                             Produced on 12JAN2001
                        Fourth Quarter 2000 Sales Totals

              Sales                       Units            Amount
              Rep.             Month       Sold              Sold

              Garcia            10          250         $7,742.50
              Garcia            10          365        $11,304.05
              Garcia            11          198         $6,132.06
              Garcia            11          120         $3,716.40
              Garcia            12        1,000        $30,970.00
              Hollingsworth     10          530        $16,414.10
              Hollingsworth     10          265         $8,207.05
              Hollingsworth     11        1,230        $38,093.10
              Hollingsworth     11          150         $7,425.00
              Hollingsworth     12          125         $6,187.50
              Hollingsworth     12          175         $5,419.75
              Jensen            10          975        $30,195.75
              Jensen            10           55         $1,703.35
              Jensen            11          453        $14,029.41
              Jensen            11           70         $2,167.90
              Jensen            12          876        $27,129.72
              Jensen            12        1,254        $38,836.38
                                        =======    ==============
                                          8,091       $255,674.02

Using macro variables can make your programs easy to modify. For example, if the previous program contained many references to Quarter and Year, then changes in only three places will produce an entirely different report:

the two values in the %LET statements
the data set name in the PROC PRINT statement

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