Hi Richie,

It depends what you mean by 'run the code'. My suggestion was that you would modify your macro to simply add the content of dataset E into dataset F each time the macro runs. Therefore, you wouldn't want F to be empty each time you ran the macro, but you would want it to be emtpy before the first run of the macro - this is simply to prevent a 'dataset does not exist' error on the first run of the macro.

So, the macro would have:

* or PROC APPEND - this way is slower but keeps F sorted by state; data F; set F E; by state; run;

and the main program would have:

* Create empty F; data F; length state $ 2; stop; run;

* Get the data; %state(states = NY); %state(states = CA); : :

* Do something with F; proc print data = f; run; .........etc.

Chris. -------------------------------------------------------- Elvis SAS Log Analyser - http://www.oview.co.uk/elvis --------------------------------------------------------