PROC FREQ on multiple variables combined into one table - sas

Question

I have the following problem. I need to run PROC FREQ on multiple variables, but I want the output to all be on the same table. Currently, a PROC FREQ statement with something like TABLES ERstatus Age Race, InsuranceStatus; will calculate frequencies for each variable and print them all on separate tables. I just want the data on ONE table.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
P.S. I tried using PROC TABULATE, but it didn't not calculate N correctly, so I'm not sure what I did wrong. Here is my code for PROC TABULATE. My variables are all categorical, so I just need to know N and percentages.
PROC TABULATE DATA = BCanalysis;
CLASS ERstatus PRstatus Race TumorStage InsuranceStatus;
TABLE (ERstatus PRstatus Race TumorStage) * (N COLPCTN), InsuranceStatus;
RUN;
The above code does not return the correct frequencies based on InsuranceStatus where 0 = insured and 1 = uninsured, but PROC FREQ does. Also doesn't calculate correctly with ROWPCTN. So any way that I can get PROC FREQ to calculate multiple variables on one table, or PROC TABULATE to return the correct frequencies, would be appreciated.
Here is a nice image of my output in a simplified analysis of only ERstatus and InsuranceStatus. You can see that PROC FREQ returns 204 people with an ERstatus of 1 and InsuranceStatus of 1. That's correct. The values in PROC TABULATE are not.
OUTPUT

Answer 1

I'll answer this separately as this is answering the other possible interpretation of the question; when it's clarified I'll delete one or the other.
If you want this in a single printed table, then you either need to use proc tabulate or you need to normalize your data - meaning put it in the form of variable | value. PROC FREQ is not capable of doing multiple one-way frequencies in a single table.
For PROC TABULATE, likely your issue is missing data. Any variable that is on the class statement will be checked for missingness, and if any rows are missing data for any of the class variables, those rows are entirely excluded from the tabulation for all variables.
You can override this by adding the missing option on the class statement, or in the table statement, or in the proc tabulate statement. So:
PROC TABULATE DATA = BCanalysis;
CLASS ERstatus PRstatus Race TumorStage InsuranceStatus/missing;
TABLE (ERstatus PRstatus Race TumorStage) * (N COLPCTN), InsuranceStatus;
RUN;
This will result in a slightly different appearance than on your table, though, as it will include the missing rows in places you probably do not want them, and they'll be factored against the colpctn when again you probably don't want them.
Typically some manipulation is then necessary; the easiest is to normalize your data and then run a tabulation (using PROC TABULATE or PROC FREQ, whichever is more appropriate; TABULATE has better percentaging options though) against that normalized dataset.
Let's say we have this:
data class;
set sashelp.class;
if _n_=5 then call missing(age);
if _n_=3 then call missing(sex);
run;
And we want these two tables in one table.
proc freq data=class;
tables age sex;
run;
If we do this:
proc tabulate data=class;
class age sex;
tables (age sex),(N colpctn);
run;
Then we get an N=17 total for both subtables - that's not what we want, we want N=18. Then we can do:
proc tabulate data=class;
class age sex/missing;
tables (age sex),(N colpctn);
run;
But that's not quite right either; I want F to have 8/18 = 44.44% and M 10/18 = 55.55%, not 42% and 53% with 5% allocated to the missing row.
The way I do this is to normalize the data. This means you get a dataset with 2 variables, varname and val, or whatever makes sense for your data, plus whatever identifier/demographic/whatnot variables you might have. val has to be character unless all of your values are numeric.
So for example here I normalize class with age and sex variables. I don't keep any identifiers, but you certainly could in your data, I imagine InsuranceStatus would be kept there if I understand what you're doing in that table. Once I have the normalized table, I just use those two variables, and carefully construct a denominator definition in proc tabulate to have the right basis for my pctn value. It's not quite the same as the single table before - the variable name is in its own column, not on top of the list of values - but honestly that looks better in my opinion.
data class_norm;
set class;
length val $2;
varname='age';
val=put(age,2. -l);
if not missing(age) then output;
varname='sex';
val=sex;
if not missing(sex) then output;
keep varname val;
run;
proc tabulate data=class_norm;
class varname val;
tables varname=' '*val=' ',n pctn<val>;
run;
If you want something better than this, you'll probably have to construct it in proc report. That gives you the most flexibility, but is the most onerous to program in also.

Answer 2

You can use ODS OUTPUT to get all of the PROC FREQ output to one dataset.
ods output onewayfreqs=class_freqs;
proc freq data=sashelp.class;
tables age sex;
run;
ods output close;
or
ods output crosstabfreqs=class_tabs;
proc freq data=sashelp.class;
tables sex*(height weight);
run;
ods output close;
Crosstabfreqs is the name of the cross-tab output, while one-way frequencies are onewayfreqs. You can use ods trace to find out the name if you forget it.
You may (probably will) still need to manipulate this dataset some to get the structure you want ultimately.