Generating month and year from Sas date

[noetsi]

I have a Sas field with days, months, and years in it. I want to create a field with only a month and year in it (no days). I know how to pull year out and month (seperately) but not how to pull both month and year out at the same time.

I know I can create one field for month and one for year and then combine them, but I am trying to avoid that option.

[Mean Joe]

The best suggestion I can come up with for now is to specify the format MONYY7.

Do you want to do something with the variable that has month/year value? Or do you just want to display it?

I want to say you can't make a variable that has just the month/year value, because SAS wouldn't understand it. eg 5/25/2012 has the value 19138 in SAS, while 5/24/2012 has the value 19137. Can't just say 5/2012. But there's ways to work around this.

Why can't you just pull the month and year and work with those variables jointly?