Comparing Missing-Value Treatments (AGGREGATE command)

The table below demonstrates the effects of specifying the MISSING subcommand and a period after the function name. Each entry in the table is the number of cases used to compute the specified function for the variable EDUC, which has 10 nonmissing cases, 5 user-missing cases, and 2 system-missing cases for the group. Note that columnwise treatment produces the same results as the default for every function except the MEAN function.

Table 1. Default versus columnwise missing-value treatments
Function	Default	Columnwise
`N`	17	17
`N.`	17	17
`N(EDUC)`	10	10
`N.(EDUC)`	15	15
`MEAN(EDUC)`	10	0
`MEAN.(EDUC)`	15	0
`NMISS(EDUC)`	7	7
`NMISS.(EDUC)`	2	2