**StudySAS Blog: Mastering Clinical Data Management with SAS**

Mastering Global and Local Macro Variables in SAS: A Detailed Guide for SDTM Programmers Mastering Global and Local Macro Variables in SAS: A Detailed Guide for SDTM Programmers In SAS programming, especially when dealing with complex tasks such as SDTM (Study Data Tabulation Model) dataset creation, macro variables play a critical role in automating processes and managing large amounts of data efficiently. Understanding the distinction between Global and Local macro variables, and how to use them appropriately, is essential for writing clean, maintainable, and robust code. What are Macro Variables in SAS? Macro variables in SAS are placeholders that store text strings, which can be reused throughout your SAS programs. They are part of the SAS Macro Language and are used to make your code more dynamic and flexible. By using macro variables, you can avoid hardcoding values and make your code easier to modify and scale. There are two pri...

Call Symput: Use CALL SYMPUT is you need to assign a data step value to a macro variable. Syntax: Call Symput (“Macro variable”, character value) The first argument to the Symput routine is the name of the macro variable to be assigned to the value from the second argument. The second argument is the character value that will be assigned to the macro variable. The second argument need to be always a character value or if a numeric value is to be used it should convert first into character variable before assigning it to macro variable. It may lead to problems, if you don’t do the conversion from numeric to character. In this case, SAS automatically converts numeric value of the variable to character value before assigning it to macro variable and prints a message in the LOG saying that conversion happened. See the example: data _null_; count= 1978 ; call symput('count',count); run; %put &count; 19 data _null_; 20 count=1978; 21 call symput('count',count); 22 run; ...