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

Data Manipulation and Transformation

This chapter will focus on introducing SAS capabilities that can help us to manipulate and transform data effectively. This chapter builds on some of the functions that we introduced in Chapter 1, Introduction to SAS Programming. The functions shared in this chapter will focus on capabilities that are tactical in nature and help to perform the task at hand. Some of the functions are similar in nature to what users of Microsoft Excel would use. However, the breadth and scope of these functions are expansive in SAS.

The number of functions in each SAS software update has been increasing. In the 9.4 release, there are more than 500 functions. These functions can be categorized as follows:

  • Character string matching and manipulation (including concatenation, replacement, and truncation)
  • Currency conversion
  • Date and time
  • Descriptive statistics
  • Financial...