I second Art's suggestion about using a retain statement.

Another way to write the if statement would be

if _n_ = 1 then base = variable1;

This assumes that you always want to use the first observation as the divisor.

Nat Wooding Environmental Specialist III Dominion, Environmental Biology 4111 Castlewood Rd Richmond, VA 23234 Phone:804-271-5313, Fax: 804-271-2977 Cel Phone: 804-205-0752

Arthur Tabachneck <art297@NETSCAPE. NET> To Sent by: "SAS(r) SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Discussion" cc <SAS-L@LISTSERV.U GA.EDU> Subject Re: a very simple question: base

07/03/2009 10:23 AM

Please respond to Arthur Tabachneck <art297@NETSCAPE. NET>

If the problem is as simple as you describe, you may be able to solve it with something like:

data have; input year variable1; cards; 2007 10 2009 5 2009 3 ;

data want (drop=base); set have; retain base; if year eq 2007 then do; base=variable1; end; ratio=variable1/base; run;

HTH, Art --------- On Fri, 3 Jul 2009 00:57:32 -0700, skyline <lautko@GMAIL.COM> wrote:

>Hello, >A very simple question: > >suppose I have a dataset test such as > >year month variable1 >2008 1 10 >2008 2 5 >2009 1 5 >2009 2 3 > >then I run > >proce means data=test2; >var variable1; >by year; >output out=test2 mean=variable2; >run; >to get (roughly) > >year variable2 >2008 7.5 >2009 4 > >from the previous post, I now know how to get > >year variable1 >2007 10 >2009 5 >2009 3 > >now I would like to get to use the 2007 value as a base so that > >year variable1 ratio >2007 10 1 >2008 5 0.5 >2009 3 0.3 > >Please advise.

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