Generic methodology in report building by using SAS® macros

SAS programmers in the pharmaceutical industry are frequently under time constraints in generating statistical tables for clinical reports. Most tables are similar in format. If we create a generic table generation program, we can greatly reduce the Statistical table generating time. This paper discusses how to create generic statistical tables generating programs for clinical reports by using SAS macro techniques and the REPORT procedure (PROC REPORT). There are two major macro structures used in the provided example, a demographic table program. Each macro determines descriptive and/or inferential statistics for continuous variables nd categorical variables. The statistical analysis for the categorical variables includes sample sizes, percentages and probability values (p-value) generated by the FREQ procedure, while the analysis for the continuous variables includes means, standard deviations (STD), ranges and p-values generated by the MEANS procedure and the GLM procedure. This example shows a generic way to build demographic tables, and the method can be applied to other tables that display continuous variables and/or categorical variables.