SAS reading SPSS data

[albert_sun]

Hi,

I experienced an issue when reading SPSS data. One variable in SPSS data was speficied as F8.3, but it actually contains more than 3 decimal places, when using SAS to read this SPSS data, the read-in of this variable only has 3 decimals, and my question is is there a way to allow SAS to read in full decimals?

[Art Kendall]

SPSS uses things like F8.3 as a display decimal format. The data are actually held in binary. These are what are called floating point number held in 64 bit words.
I would be surprised if SAS truncated its internal representation to 3 decimal places,
open a new instance SPSS
paste the syntax below into a syntax window.
Run it.

data list list /x (f3).
begin data
3
4
5
7
9
11
13
end data.
compute y = 1/x.
formats y (f8.3).
list.
formats y (f16.8).
list.