SAS Certification Prep Guide: Base Programming for SAS 9, Third Edition

Associating User-Defined Formats with Variables

Referencing Your Formats

Remember that permanent, user-defined formats are stored in a format catalog. For example, the program below stores the format JOBFMT in a catalog named Library.Formats, which is located in the directory C:\Sas\Formats\Lib in the Windows environment.

libname library 'c:\sas\formats\lib'; 
proc format lib=library; 
   value jobfmt 
         103='manager' 
         105='text processor' 
         111='assoc. technical writer' 
         112='technical writer' 
         113='senior technical writer'; 
run;

To use the JOBFMT format in a subsequent SAS session, you must assign the libref Library again.

libname library 'c:\sas\formats\lib'; 

SAS searches for the format JOBFMT in two libraries, in this order:

• the temporary ...