Creating a dataset from this file would be easy to read with column input and even easier with list input. However, suppose that you only needed to use the students' names and project grades. You can use column pointers to skip over undesired data. Column pointers use the @ symbol to tell SAS to begin reading data at a specified column. In this example, we need to know that the names start in Column 1; project grades, in Column 13. The following statements could be used.