SAS® Learner Response System - SAS Programming 1: Essentials Question Workbook

8th February 2012

SAS Institute

Wittington House Henley Road Medmenham Marlow Bucks SL7 2EB

This document is the confidential and proprietary property of SAS Institute Inc. It may

contain approaches, techniques, and other information proprietary to SAS, and shall not

be disclosed in whole or in part to third parties without the prior written consent of SAS.

Copyright 2012 SAS Institute Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction ..................................................................................... 4

Chapter 2: Getting Started with SAS ............................................................... 7

Chapter 3: Working with SAS Syntax .............................................................. 9

Chapter 4: Getting Familiar with SAS Data Sets .......................................... 11

Chapter 5: Reading SAS Data Sets ................................................................ 14

Chapter 6: Reading Excel Worksheets .......................................................... 18

Chapter 7: Reading Delimited Raw Data Files .............................................. 20

Chapter 8: Validating and Cleaning Data ...................................................... 23

Chapter 9: Manipulating Data ......................................................................... 26

Chapter 10: Combining SAS Data Sets ......................................................... 30

Chapter 11: Summary Reports ....................................................................... 36

Chapter 12: Enhancing Reports ..................................................................... 40

Chapter 15: Confidence and Relevance ........................................................ 46

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Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the course but more importantly it gives you an overview of SAS

and specifically the four data-driven tasks normally associated with getting to the information that you

need. The four data-driven tasks are: accessing data; manipulating or managing data; analysing data;

presenting data. Generally speaking 80% of the process deals with accessing and managing data

with the remaining 20% focussing on analysis and reporting. It isn’t always the case that you will start

by accessing data and go through all four steps in the process. It may be that your data is already

prepared for analysis or reporting.

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Chapter 2: Getting Started with SAS

Before we can start programming it’s important to understand what makes a SAS program and how

to use the SAS windowing environment interface to run a program and confirm it has executed

correctly.

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Chapter 3: Working with SAS Syntax

Having got to grips with some of the fundamentals of SAS programs this chapter looks a little deeper,

exploring SAS syntax rules and how to diagnose and solve SAS syntax errors. The basics are

straightforward: a SAS program consists of a series of steps; a step consists of a series of

statements; statements begin with an identifying keyword and end with a semi-colon. The most

common syntax error is a missing semi-colon! Fortunately the Enhanced Editor colour coding can

help make syntax errors easier to spot.

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Chapter 4: Getting Familiar with SAS Data Sets

In Chapter 4 we look at the first of our four data-driven tasks – accessing data. In this case we are

looking at how to access existing SAS data sets. A SAS data set is a proprietary file type so it’s

important to understand some of the terminology associated with this data source before

investigating how to access them for use.

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Associated Key Learning Point: Generating Reports

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Associated Key Learning Point: Managing Data

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Chapter 5: Reading SAS Data Sets

Remember we said that there are four data-driven tasks, the first is accessing data and the second is

managing data. In this chapter we're starting to look at how to manage our data by creating a new

SAS data set from an existing SAS data set. We explored techniques for selecting observations and

variables and applying permanent attributes to variables. It's never too early to start thinking about the

efficiency of your programs so think about how SAS processes and when/how you should be

asking SAS to drop or keep variables.

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Chapter 6: Reading Excel Worksheets

SAS can read many different forms of data. By using SAS/ACCESS software you can access

common data sources including Oracle, Teradata and Microsoft files. In order to read Microsoft Excel

or Microsoft Access data, SAS/ACCESS for PC File Formats must be licensed. This software also

provides additional functionality to the Import/Export Wizard which is covered in the self-study

Section 6.2.

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Chapter 7: Reading Delimited Raw Data Files

Chapter 7 brought us to our final example of accessing data – reading raw data files, specifically a

delimited raw data file. This is a more common task than you might realise simply because lots of

applications can read and write to this type of data file. In this chapter we also started to look at how

SAS processes a DATA step – the concept of compilation and execution and the Program Data

Vector (PDV). This is a very important concept to get to grips with. It will help you enormously when

your program seems to have executed properly but you are not seeing the output that you expected.

This is called a logic error. Being able to walk-through how the DATA step is processed will enable

you to debug this type of error.

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Chapter 8: Validating and Cleaning Data

Understanding your data is vital to ensuring your programs are working correctly and giving you the

correct output. It's important to remember that unclean data is a part of day-to-day life for a SAS

Programmer. This chapter looks at how to identify unclean data and what you can do about it. Firstly,

we looked at what happens when we read in a raw data file that contains invalid data. Remember, this

isn't a syntax error so you won't see error or warning messages in the log. This makes it all the more

important to read the SAS log properly after your program has finished executing. You will see invalid

data errors which have been prompted by the SAS temporary variable _ERROR_.

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Chapter 9: Manipulating Data

This chapter teaches you how to create new variables using assignment statements. These variables

were created using SAS functions and also we looked at creating multiple variables based on

conditions using DO and END statements. There was also a review of Compilation and Execution

stage and a review of dropping and keeping variables. These function categories are covered in the

second programming course SAS Programming 2: Data Manipulation Techniques.

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Chapter 10: Combining SAS Data Sets

This chapter teaches you several different ways to combine SAS data sets, including appending,

concatenation, interleaving and merging. The section on merging also covered the different types of

merges, one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many and non-matches and also looked at different

techniques to control which observations are output to the new data sets.

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Chapter 11: Summary Reports

This chapter dealt with producing summary reports using SAS procedures. The content consisted of

investigating in more detail, the FREQ, MEANS/SUMMARY and the TABULATE procedures. For

each of the procedures we began with a basic set of statements and then enhanced each procedure

with additional statements and options.

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Chapter 12: Enhancing Reports

This chapter introduced several different ways of enhancing reports. We covered some global

statements, for example TITLE and FOOTNOTE, as well as using LABEL and FORMAT statements

within DATA steps and procedure steps. We also looked at directing output to various different output

files by using ODS statements and also added some style definitions to change the appearance of the

output files.

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Chapter 15: Confidence and Relevance

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