1. Use of PROC TABULATE Out File to Customize Tables

2. Abdus Shahid Western Oregon University
Out file from PROC TABULATE process of SAS® can be used to customize final output tables needed for reports. This method is especially useful when PROC TABULATE is used for several disparate data sets but the final output requires data to be presented in one final table. Take the following table as an example. High school GPA may reside in one table and SAT Math scores may be in another table. Missing values for GPA were entered as blanks while missing SAT Math scores were stored as zeros. Merging these two data sets will not allow us to run one tabulation process. Also merging of data sets require at least one common unique identifier for every student which may not always exist. Let us assume that high school GPA and SAT Math scores are in one table, or two tables can be merged. So we try the following syntax: Next, we try this syntax:

3. If run PROC TABULATE separately, we get the averages shown in table on the right:
Transposing SAT_2016 produces this:
Only GPA
All we need to do now is to merge these two transposed files, rename the columns and drop the columns we don’t need:
It’s obvious that correct averages can only be obtained by tabulating the averages separately, either from the same data set or different data sets.
Output from the merged file:
Only SAT Math
Out files from PROC TABULATE process becomes useful in such a situation. Out file GPA_2016 from PROC TABULATE of GPA provides us the following:
If we follow through this process for all the variables, we will get all the averages in one table:
Transposing the out file gives us this: