Book Image

Hands-On SAS for Data Analysis

By : Harish Gulati
Book Image

Hands-On SAS for Data Analysis

By: Harish Gulati

Overview of this book

SAS is one of the leading enterprise tools in the world today when it comes to data management and analysis. It enables the fast and easy processing of data and helps you gain valuable business insights for effective decision-making. This book will serve as a comprehensive guide that will prepare you for the SAS certification exam. After a quick overview of the SAS architecture and components, the book will take you through the different approaches to importing and reading data from different sources using SAS. You will then cover SAS Base and 4GL, understanding data management and analysis, along with exploring SAS functions for data manipulation and transformation. Next, you'll discover SQL procedures and get up to speed on creating and validating queries. In the concluding chapters, you'll learn all about data visualization, right from creating bar charts and sample geographic maps through to assigning patterns and formats. In addition to this, the book will focus on macro programming and its advanced aspects. By the end of this book, you will be well versed in SAS programming and have the skills you need to easily handle and manage your data-related problems in SAS.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: SAS Basics
4
Section 2: Merging, Optimizing, and Descriptive Statistics
7
Section 3: Advanced Programming
10
Section 4: SQL in SAS
13
Section 5: Data Visualization and Reporting

Formats

There are usually three scenarios when formats are used in SAS:

  • To format the data available to make it more readable
  • To assign a specific format to make the data more meaningful
  • To alter the data type to make calculations, derivations, and so on

Formatting to make the data readable

SAS stores all dates as single unique numbers in a numeric format. All dates are stored as the number of dates from January 1, 1960. If you think of a number line, all dates prior to January 1, 1960 are negative and all dates after that are positive. It’s cumbersome to decode the numeric dates. An easier alternative is to get SAS to display a date using a date format. Let's look at our cost of living dataset with the addition...